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An artistic journey between photography and abstract paint, made to unveil the sweetness that is deep inside me. In beige, white and soft tones.
When I was a kid, drawing was my favorite activity. My tall sister was studying and making art work almost all the time. This is where my love for art and creating art started. I wanted to draw like her. And – something different – I also wanted to learn languages. I started with English, which ignited the desire to live abroad, travel, and be surrounded by “the foreign.” I applied for jobs abroad and I luckily moved to Switzerland. At that moment, not only my adventure as an expatriate started, but also my photography journey.
As an expatriate, I wished to share the landscape around me and what I discovered everyday. Switzerland is a lot different from France, and photography was a way to share my journey with my relatives and friends, and to bring them with me in a way. I bought my camera in 2018 and then my boyfriend offered me a landscape photography course for Christmas and it clicked!
Nowadays, photography is always with me. You do not need much, your phone is sometimes perfectly enough. When I’m walking, I tend to put every piece of landscape in a frame to think my photograph ahead; though sometimes it can also be spontaneous, following my feelings. Karl Lagerfeld said: “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” Doing photography, I can capture this exact moment – share with the world how I felt and make them hopefully feel the same. I can also use a special composition to abstract the element from its subject. This is what I wanted to make with the Golden Wave.
With time, I tend to think that art is everywhere with and around us. Design, for example, is a type of art. Behind the plate you’re eating on or the lamp on your bedside table there is always an artist; someone who has drawn it, who has been thinking about it… I like to think about these stories. With art, you’re going beyond the subject and beyond the real, as you can reinterpret it. When making some abstract paintings, I like to ask myself after the fact: “What did I really want to make? What was my intention?” As often, I just let it go to make something beyond the real.
"Painting is complementary to photography as I can create my own universe and the way I see things. In the end, you can’t touch art, you can’t see it, you just have to live it."
Photography, as well as abstract painting are for me a way to press pause and breathe deeply. It’s a way to express my creativity, what I’ve got in my head. When I make my work and show it to the world, I have the feeling to express who I truly am, while unveiling the sweetness inside me.
My imagination can be fruitful, at those moments I just go with my camera and shoot whatever I feel like. Other times nothing comes to my mind and for my creativity to flow I need some stimulation. I am looking on Pinterest, paper fashion magazines, and photography magazines to find new compositions and techniques. Then the process does its work and ideas come up, and I make sure to take advantage of these moments! If an idea comes through my mind I’m writing them down with key words that help me remember and get back in the same state of mind and creativity. It could be colors, atmosphere, subjects… Then, I make a moodboard – or sometimes the moodboard is just in my head! And finally, I just shot.
Imagination and creativity, though, is not always flowing. Sometimes I have the feeling I am always taking the same photos and I know there’s the need for a change. In those periods, I tend to leave the camera in the house to just go out and to observe – to reset and recharge my inspiration. For me, the worst thing to do in those circumstances is to scroll on social media and to look at what others are doing to find inspiration. That way, you’re always comparing yourself to others and you can feel even more incompetent. Instead, I enjoy reading paper magazines and looking at what I’ve done in the past to try to be proud of my photographic work.
One photo I particularly loved creating was the one from Phare De Men Ruz (lighthouse).
I took this photo during a trip to Brittany, the region where I was born. I have a tourist guide book from Brittany and the Phare de Men Ruz was on the cover page. I wanted to take a picture of this place in a night mood. The coastline where the Phare De Men Ruz is located is very particular as all the rocks have pinkish tones in this area. I was really looking forward to being there to see this cover picture with my own eyes. I went on this trip as a kind of a “reset” moment. It was an October night, and I was obsessed with taking pictures where the stars were visible in the night sky. At the same time, I wanted to do a long exposure to show the movement of the waves. It was almost dark (end of the golden hour), windy and very cold and I was sitting on the rocks close to the water, feeling alone in this world and afraid that something wrong would happen with this strong wind. I set the camera on the tripod, I clicked and firmly maintained the camera for a 30 seconds long exposure. And the magic happened! I found the results amazing right away.
"I was happy to have stayed despite the challenging weather conditions and to have captured how firmly the Phare de Men Ruz was standing there, serene, still, in front of the rough sea and in the blustery winds."
After that trip and since I moved two years ago, Nyon, Switzerland, has been my home town. In Nyon, there is the Geneva lake, from where you can see the Mont Blanc and the Swiss Alps in the background. When it’s foggy and you cannot see the mountain, the lake is the king; and when the sky is clear, the mountains are the queens. After all, having the lake and the mountains, Nyon is like being at the sea, the landscape changes every day. Some days the lake is quiet, some days the strong wind makes it wild and rough! Either way, it’s a great photography spot. I stop, enjoy the view and take a deep breath. Then I am ready to take my camera.
Photography is my creative journey. The search for serenity and inner peace in my pictures inspires me. I wish the audience to feel peaceful when looking at my photos, and to feel free to make their own story based on what they see. It‘s important for me to leave space for personal interpretation of a picture.
To achieve that, I keep my photos minimal. I remove what I would call useless details to help viewers focus on the subject. By doing that I invite the audience to also press pause and to onboard on a journey of adventure and serenity, to unveil the sweetness, the dream, the imagination, that’s deep inside.
"That what art provokes within you is worth observing and listening to with attention."
As a hobby photographer, when I decided to focus on minimalism, I felt non-legitimate. I’m not a professional fine art photographer, and I had the feeling to pretend to be. To overcome this, I adapted my material with a long focal lense to shoot up to 200mm. Then, I just went shooting and got where I wanted to go with trial and error. I mainly had to deal with the legitimacy question before even starting to shoot and during the process of trial and error, which has been the most complicated. I am happy I managed to follow that sweetness, that imagination, that feeling when I am creating, and now my art, the minimalist style, feels really mine. I feel at ease with it and it is what I prefer creating.
"Now I not only know, but also genuinely feel internally, that, when it comes to art, there’s no right or wrong. The legitimacy question doesn’t exist. Everyone is allowed to create freely."
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