Bath in Saorge

 

Any painting of Art is like creating beauty through extended forms in the space of the canvas. It is agreed and accepted that a thing is beautiful from the moment when its contemplation gives us a complacency whose vision is beatific..

It was in Fontan Saorge, a small village hung on the mountain of the Alpes de Haute Provence, with our friends patrons Laure and Philippe Bizot, who kindly lent us their apartment. We were returning from a day during which Isabelle had finished a series of paintings of the small Via Soutana; Isabelle was taking a bath.

I made a quick sketch of her in her bathtub. I could have called this picture “woman in the bath”, I started in several sketches without worrying about reality that transcribe with pencil, the fullness that Isabelle felt. There was a mirror behind her, and contrary to what Virginia Woolf thinks of the mirrors, I thought it was perfectly in its place.

Back in Paris, I forgot all the true colors of the bathroom to indulge in a work of prescription which imposes on the visual memory the order of the psychic, IE the will to remember the forms, sensations, feeling, what I call the clarity and unity of the idea, the vision preserved after my eyes have finished seeing the scene.

I took a canvas, I put a quick plan inspired by the sketches made to Saorge, I began to paint. It took only one afternoon to complete this painting. When you paint your wife, you know her shapes, you taste her colors even better.

“Isabelle au Bain”, oil painting on linen and cotton, size 90cm x 60cm, dated 2018.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen (Bis bald Tschüss….!) / Best regards / Cordialement / С наилучшими пожеланиями….
For Philippe Morin Koronin, Konstanz von Hochbach