For as long as I could remember, I always wanted to be an artist. Lucky for me, loving parents nurtured my artistic inclinations from childhood onward, exposing me to art and encouraging my ambitions, even when I left home to study at École Nationale des Beaux Arts.

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Although, my artistic education began long before that. Every summer, the family left Brest to explore Europe, visiting the continent’s natural and man-made wonders.  We saw so many cathedrals, museums, and ancient cities that it was impossible not to be marked by history and touched by art.

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My mother was an avid reader and amateur historian who guided us through the ruins, bringing past worlds to life.  Equally at home in ancient Athens and modern Brittany, she could discuss Demosthenes with the same familiarity as she did of close friends or her favorite poet, Jacques Prévert.  Thanks to my mother, I love history.

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As a child, I lived in medieval cities, like St. Pol de Leon, with its breathtaking view of the fifteenth century Chapelle de Notre-Dame du Kreisker–its tower, the highest in all Brittany.  I also lived the city of Pont-Croix, not far from Pont-Aven, where Gauguin, Serrusier, Bernard, and so many others came to paint.

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I remember my father showing me a Gauguin painting hanging on the wall inside a Pont-Croix restaurant.  And I remember seeing religious processions winding through flower-covered street, brightly colored banners and tapestries hanging from the houses.

 

During tempests, my father took me to the ocean.  I admired its fury, passion, unending energy, and relentless strife.  Only later in life did I reconcile this chaos with another aspect of the ocean, its gentle and soothing nature.  I realized, in the years that followed, that this duality signifies Brittany to me, its elemental dynamic, the formative forces from which my own life seems inextricable.

 

Those early years in Brittany still echo throughout my work, sustained even to this today.  Perhaps this explains my interest in turning back time.  I specialize in sculpting youthful versions of my models.  Like a historian, I work with fragments from the past, residual traces in physical flesh suggesting the vanished visage.  I strive to uncover a hidden essence, the youthful core inside my subjects, forgotten forms best revealed only after having passed.  Through sculpture, I rediscover the past inside an ocean of time.”