Learningto look

Roots

I grew up in the Dordogne, in the south-west of France, in a family of artists and sculptors. It's a region that drew the surrealists and the cubists, and I think some of that got into me without my noticing: you can see it in the lines I'm drawn to and in the way I use color. That valley never left me. It is also the setting of my award-winning novella, Scent of a Truffle, a story of roots, legacy and truffle hunting.

Practice

Today I paint mostly in oil and cold wax, building each painting in layers. The work is abstract, but it hovers between a landscape out there and something going on inside. I keep coming back to the in-between places: where light turns into shadow, where something you recognize starts to dissolve. You can wander through my paintings, and some of them begin with a conversation, painted for one particular home.

Slow viewing

That is what connects everything I do. My paintings ask you to slow down and stay with them, and slow viewing is the heart of my contemplation workshops: one painting, a little longer each time, until you start to see differently, so the next beautiful moment finds you ready.

Where the work lives

My paintings live in private collections in France, England, the US and India. I'm represented by Three Stones Gallery in Concord, The Woodstock Gallery in Vermont and The Hyde Gallery in London, and I'm part of the SoWa Artist Guild in Boston.

Teaching

When I'm not at the easel, I'm in the classroom, teaching French at Wellesley College. I did my PhD at Boston University, and before that studied literature and art history at the Sorbonne, in Paris.