Jean-François
Altmayer

Self-taught French painter. Started painting in 1985, practicing drawing and watercolor for ten years. My learning was built through books and my exploration of museums, catalogs, everything that could relate to art. At the same time as we discover the color, the composition, the shapes that we can give to a work, we also discover ourselves, we find our emotions, our feelings, our personality. Because art is not made to decorate, it is truly created from an identity, a character, an experience that is specific to each individual, a personality in short. Watercolor turned out to be a very limiting technique to be able to represent what I had found in myself, what I wanted to express. Painting with acrylic on canvas was a real revelation. Painting and building a work is done step by step, it is not enough to want to do as a recognized artist or another to do your work, you must above all, find within yourself, what you have to say, find your true form of expression.Saying and putting into images my thoughts, my ideas, my emotions, about my life and about life, this is how I have painted now for more than twenty years, on humans, on the world that we have created. My work has evolved, each of my paintings can seem different and at the same time radically unique, because, ultimately, I paint little. I had to do something else... art never gave me something to live for, but art makes me Alive. It was by looking at my time, so changing since my birth, by exploring life, by analyzing mine, by wanting to understand what I was, what I was doing in this life, that I imagined these ideas to put in shape and color. It is by exploring humanity, my humanity, and that of which I am a part, that I discovered and tried to understand another world, that of my artistic expression.