In the land of a thousand and one nights

Émilie PAULY, France

Self-taught artist, I started painting in 2014, a few years after the birth of my son. The path that led me to painting? Essentially the need to escape a boring professional life, to reconnect with my childhood dreams at a time when I had lost myself, and the desire to bring fantasy to everyone (young and old). I was fascinated by the magnificent illustrations discovered in the children's books that I read to my child, and I wanted to create my own images, my own paintings, which would tell the story of my inner world, my dreams, my fantasies, my ideals. I wanted to paint what transported me so as to never forget it, to keep a memory of it that I could pass on, communicate. I wanted to paint to reconcile myself with a life in which I didn't really recognize myself, to find who I was, finally. Accept the past, understand the present that results from it and love it. Because beauty is ultimately everywhere and because it is always possible to rewrite the story of one's life. When I create pencil characters, I never know in advance what I am going to draw. I let my hand go and then I see what appears. I like not knowing where my actions will lead me. I like to be surprised by what emerges from the first strokes of the pencil. I have the pleasant feeling of accessing something of myself that had been lost (in my unconscious or in my distant memories, whatever?). When I have gathered a fairly large number of pencil drawings, I look for those that could be assembled in the same scene, the characters who could experience adventures together within the same painting. I spend a lot of time creating these compositions. When I discovered which characters have things to say to each other and in what setting they could evolve, I move on to painting. I always paint my background first (a natural landscape) then I insert my characters into it. Everything is done with acrylic gouache. Painting and drawing appeared to me to be more reliable, more powerful means of expression than texts and speeches. A linguist by training, I nevertheless worked for a long time on words and the construction of meaning, when I was preparing my doctoral thesis. The polysemy in languages is sometimes so dizzying! If I have remained sensitive to the poetry of literary works as well as the beauty of well-conducted arguments, these move me less, today, than poetry or the beauty of images. Words, sometimes misleading or a source of misunderstanding, never colorful enough or on the contrary too saturated, cannot do everything. When we no longer know what to say or how to say it, when words are lacking, when silence is required, painting, sculpture, music or dance can take over, for the pleasure of all. Where words and languages separate us, art ultimately brings us together.