The gallery of Eric Bourdon, French artist painter

Eric Bourdon, contemporary French artist painter, Lille, France

“ Eric Bourdon - Cheerful delirium ”

color-A1 His universe is merry and fanciful, the stroke, spontaneous, has a great time on the canvas, virtuoso of the line, curves and arabesques, until the bright and luminous colours burst onto the scene and repossess it.

Eric Bourdon bends kind monsters into shape who glide gracefully among a faun of individuals whose silhouettes are of the most amazing, plump or lanky, always infinitely sympathetic and delighted to come to stimulate our dormant child souls. color-A2

Extract from the article by Samantha Deman,

art critic for Arts Hebdo Medias

The information site dedicated to contemporary art

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color-A1 Eric Bourdon is a man with no story to tell, and a sketch artist without technique.

Every day (like every painting) is a new beginning ! For him, improvisation is the only rule of the game, it is at the heart of artistic activity.

Bringing out colourful emotions and folkloric characters from a few lines drawn “without thinking”, is to cultivate graphic creativity at its most basic level.

Scribbler by profession, Eric Bourdon only tries to shed light on the creative wealth of chance and accident, and to reveal their inexhaustible potential when it comes to creating a myriad of creatures… that we would have never thought of ! color-A2

“ Eric Bourdon - Painter, Sketch artist ”

Extract from the catalog of the exhibition

Solid’Art in Lille, France (2017)

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ERIC BOURDON, FRENCH PAINTER

language English

The gallery of French contemporary artist painter Eric Bourdon is almost more drawing than painting. It is a game with lines, first drawn in a spontaneous manner, random, much like a child doodling, made with chalk or acrylic paint. The lines are then worked, and reworked again and again, until something new, a precise figure, a character, emerges from this chaos. Each time, a new meaning comes to life from the nothingness. Using a few improvised strokes, artist painter Eric Bourdon shapes all new and fascinating characters in a pop style, symbolic and full of joy, emotions and colours. A pictorial work that appeals both to adults and younger, with these comic drawings and very bright acrylic colours, creations of which we see a selection on the website of the self-taught artist from Lille, in France.

It is around Lille, Capital of Flanders, that the French painter Eric Bourdon sometimes hosts improvisational drawing workshops. The artist’s gallery gives you an online overview of these “ creative doodling workshops ”. In Roubaix, Lesquin, Villeneuve d’Ascq... he has visited mainly primary schools to carry out various types of visual art projects.

These courses in drawing and painting aim to creatively develop the ability (called 'pareidolia') human beings have, at an early stage, to identify faces, silhouettes, and shapes in a fuzzy visual content : partial darkness, clouds, the cream of a cappuccino, an old discoloured wallpaper, an abstract painting... But this also allows Eric Bourdon to initially introduce the pupils to some of the 'great painters' (via their works) of modern and contemporary art. Wassily Kandinsky, to play with geometric figures, Henri Matisse, to juggle with forms, the contemporary painter Sean Scully, to evoke the primary colours and have fun creating contrasts... Not to mention certain artists such as Jean Dubuffet, who gave Art Brut (Outsider Art) its name, or the visual artist Victor Vasarely, father of Optical Art (Op Art)...

After having walked along in the footsteps of art history and reviewing it in a playful way, the children can then create their entirely personal works, painting with watercolours (gouache primarily). They will also collectively paint a picture on canvas, wood or cardboard, and prepare their first exhibition. For this, Eric Bourdon presents to the budding young artists two Spanish painters who have a direct link with his way of drawing in improvisation : Joan Miró, especially, but also Pablo Picasso (the Picasso of the video 'The Mystery of Picasso', a documentary created during his lifetime by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who films him in the process of drawing live ; and his masterpiece Guernica presented at the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1937).

Picasso seemed to improvise his drawings from the beginning, while generally bringing them swiftly back to the few real and well known figures that captivated him, or even obsessed him : Woman / Horse / Bull (while in primary school, these first improvised drawings can easily finish as a : Dragon / Car / Princess...). But Joan Miró had a more expansive and less specific 'surrealist' graphic universe, which allowed him to improvise figures or symbols that 'spoke' to the viewer, without, however, us being able to describe what exactly these mysterious faces and characters wanted to tell us, what planet they came from, or what they were supposed to represent...

A large number of paintings born in improvisation under Miró’s brush were endowed with a great power of expression, without even representing anything at all ! And for Eric Bourdon, that’s the whole game of improvisation : to start drawing, painting, with a creative freedom and an open 'field of possibilities', but without falling back too fast, en route, on the repertoire of known and recurring figures that close the game, on the reference points that reassure but limit the possibilities and cut short the adventure of the imagination...

QUOTES ON ART, PAINTERS AND CREATIVE REVERIE…

raphael sistine madonna angel

I can't refrain from setting among these precepts a new speculative device which, although it may appear

trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions.

When you look at any walls spotted with various stains, or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, with the idea of imagining some scene, you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see diverse combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes,

and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into clear and whole form.

With such walls and blends of different stones it comes about as it does with the sound of bells,

in whose clanging you may discover every name and word you can imagine.

Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks

I went to class. Fever burned my lips. Leaning over my desk, I stared at the walls, whose peeling paint and cracks composed allegorical figures and characters. Under the desk, a ballerina ; above, a Roman soldier, alone ; his brothers in arms were not there. Meanwhile, head in his hands, the brother read aloud from a dusty book, covered with the paper of a French magazine. The hour seemed endless to me.

Salvador Dalí, A Journal : 1919-1920, My Impressions and Intimate Memories

On returning home, I spent a part of the night with my head bowed over my fire, which told me nothing : I had not, like the Persians, an imagination rich enough to persuade me that the flame resembled the anemone, the cinders the pomegranate. I listened to the carriages coming, going, crossing each other ; their distant rolling imitated the murmur of the sea upon the shores of my Brittany or of the wind in the Combourg woods. These worldly sounds which reminded me of those of solitude aroused my regrets ; I conjured up my old trouble, or else my imagination would invent the story of the persons whom those chariots were bearing away : I saw radiant drawing-rooms, balls, loves, conquests. Soon, recalled to reality, I found myself deserted in a lodging, seeing the world through the window and hearing it by the echoes of my fireside.

François de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Book IV, Chap. 8

A well-integrated, academic, world says : "This one is a painter, this one isn’t a painter." He is a painter because he is ‘patented’, because the state says that he is a painter, because he is certified as a painter - that was the Academie. From the time that Manet made his move, no one could say any more who was a painter. In other words, there was a transition from nomos to anomie, that is, to a world in which everyone can legitimately struggle over legitimacy. No one can say any more : "I am a painter" without finding someone who will say : "No, you’re not a painter, and I can challenge your legitimacy in the name of my claim to legitimacy."

Pierre Bourdieu in The Sociologist and the Historian (interviews from 1988 published in 2010)

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint,

and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch Post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

I never know what I’m going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I’m just the middleman.

Peter Max, American master of Pop Art (born in 1937)

Art cannot be modern, art is eternal.

Egon Schiele, Austrian Expressionist painter (1890-1918)