Michèle Goumain

After an active professional life that led me from advertising to tableware and decoration, I joined the Nicolas Poussin workshop in Montparnasse to be initiated to different drawing and painting techniques by professional painters from the École Boulle and the Arts Décoratifs. 

I learned to look, with a new eye, at everything that surrounds me. To analyze it and to detect the detail which will awaken my imagination and "make me go elsewhere...".

I study composition more closely. I visit exhibitions. Cubist painters fascinate me and I spend hours scrutinizing the layout of their paintings.

Wherever I go, I look for lines that match, colors that respond to each other, rhythms that can be played with. If I fragment my vision in the manner of a mosaic, it is to recompose later by structuring and simplifying because it is, for me, essential that the whole is built and especially balanced and harmonious.

The work of the earth, that I approach later, makes me discover a sensual, voluptuous matter, perfectly complementary to the work of painter. But here again, the curves have to fit together, the straight lines have to respond to each other, for a fluid and harmonious whole, solid and finished.

Whether flat or in volume, my work evolves towards simplification. Little by little I free myself from details to the benefit of an enlarged, synthetic vision. The abstraction approaches. But the gesture remains precise.

The most beautiful reward? When a person smiles while looking at one of my works...