Ti Ban

Born on a peninsula bordered by mud and sand that was still wild at the time, my art school was a neglected 11th century abbey, and my teacher was a sculptor from Berlin, thirty years my senior. I discovered pictorial design, Kunstforum, art history and beauty. Then I worked intensively with a painter from Zurich. He said: ‘You were painting emptiness with sand’. So he took away all the tricks, and all I had was brushes. I met the Art of Painting. He used to say: ‘Painting is like a woman, she's beautiful when she has pretty underwear’. I understood the background, the tricks, the values.

Since then, I've always painted in parallel with a pure painting, the second narrative. I've cut back on the primary colours to avoid the illusion of their brightness, and reduced the palette to capture them as best I can, to capture the atmosphere, to try to tame the light. I always enter a painting as if I were in a field, only to emerge as if from a garden. Step by step I paint, leaving the painting alone, from the back, to draw its image, to perfect its demands.

I always paint with stage fright because I know that painting begins where man's steps end.