Phi – Artiste – Peintre
About Phi
Website: www.phi-artiste-peintre.com
Instagram: @phiartistepeintre2024
Facebook: Phi-Artiste-Peintre et Copiste
Linkedin: Φ-Phi
Φ-Phi... a strange name for an artist! Yet it's the one she chose when she was a child, already traced on the back of my first drawings. The Phi of philosophy, the Phi of physics. A happy combination of wisdom and relationship with the world.
She was born in Paris in 1968, an accident because my roots are 100% from « Bretagne ». At lycée, she took a Baccalauréat in plastic arts. She drew and painted a lot in her early years. Then she put creative work on hold for a while to study art history at the University of Rennes.
For 27 years, Ishewas a lecturer and researcher in this discipline at the University of Toulouse. Phi returned to creation gradually, in 2015-2016: with a restorer friend, we were able to set up practical oil painting workshops on the theme of "Old artistic skills, painting in the manner of...". It was a wonderful experience that led to some fine exhibitions of the work of students, some of whom had never even touched a brush.
Creation and transmission are both part of her goals. Until the day when the irrepressible need to come back to oneself, not just as a searcher or a teacher, was felt. To be reborn as a portrait painter and copyist.
A primordial encounter? With a pencil drawing by Holbein the Younger, in Year 6!
Artist Statement
« I am a creator, but not only that. I am also a copyist: the two are closely linked from my point of view. Let me explain… Finally, it stems from a state of mind: I think that learning, whatever it may be, is never really finished and that you always have to go back to the basics. That's probably why I like reproducing the works of 16th and 17th century painters, observing them and thinking about their choices. Copying' in the proper sense of the word, copying as an essential step, with the values that were its own in past centuries. Copying as a first step for Creation. It is also a look at traditions: those of the masters of the Renaissance or the Baroque age. These are omnipresent in my work as an artist, inspiring and guiding it. This approach leads to careful observation and reflection on what lies behind the painting: the gestures, the techniques, the supports, the binders, the pigments. Knowledge of our artistic heritage is essential to this process, so we need to go back to texts, written sources, painters' words... not forgetting modern science, which can reveal the wonders of the past. I'm not just a 'copyist'. The inspirations that guide me as a painter are deeply linked to the desire to translate emotions and affects through painting. I want to conjure up memories through contemplation, to evoke an emotional resonance in those who look at my creations; As a Phi-Artist-Painter, I devote myself to portraiture, landscape painting and still life using oil paints, a technique that allows me to work on minute details and create light and texture effects with exceptional precision and realism. I seek to capture the essence of reality, not to freeze it, but to make it vibrate. This realistic approach is not a quest for photographic perfection; each brushstroke, each irregular glaze, each shadow that stretches with a slight hesitation betrays the hand that drew it. My works remain faithful to the medium of oil: thick, rebellious, always alive. My paintings invite you to come closer, to scrutinise the traces of the human hand in the details. It is there, in the medium and the gesture, that I leave my mark, in a silent dialogue between the subject and the artist who painted it. This work is about matter, thickness, textures and shine, flat and opaque, but above all about colour and light. » (Phi-Artiste-Peintre)
