I had the desire to paint and draw very early on but I didn’t practice much because I didn’t have any confidence in myself.
I was not attracted by academic drawing, I was self-taught and I did not know how to draw.
It took me a long time to find my way, I had to hold on, experiment, let go and everything went better when I understood that I should no longer try to have control but welcome the unexpected and appropriate it.
Then began a dialogue with the invisible
Then I use pencils, gouache or pastels to give shape to these presences that appear in the material.
For the black and white drawings, they are made with charcoal and black chalk in automatic drawing.
I work with fluid materials to begin with, such as water, ink and watercolor, because these mediums are particularly conducive, as far as I am concerned, to revealing the beyond appearances, they help me to cross borders and to access parallel worlds.
Concerning the cyanotype technique, it is an old photographic printing or reproduction technique, I use it to make multiple prints in limited series of some of my drawings: it consists in putting on a sheet of paper a chemical product which is sensitive to light, one puts on the sheet a negative of the photo which one wishes to reproduce (for me a negative of my drawings which I prepare myself), it is necessary to put it then in the sun a few minutes then to pass the sheet under water and there always appears in blue a reproduction of the drawing drawn from the negative. I particularly appreciate the blue obtained with this technique which is close to the dreamlike world.
My inspiration can come from everyday things, I like to look at where appearances fall and see the magic in a realistic environment.
I am for example very inspired by tomato slices, when I cut up tomatoes while preparing food I marvel at what I see inside each slice, I find the tomato particularly inhabited by a wonderful world, hence the origin of my Tomato Heart drawings.
I also made a series of drawings from photos of the surface of the river, these photos were for me like a freeze-frame of a story that the river tells or perhaps this river water is a bearer of memory, that of the countries and times it has crossed? So I drew from these photos to give shape to what I saw appearing.
Nature, women, animals or hybrid creatures, spirituality are the main sources of inspiration for my paintings, all set in a dreamlike universe.
As in tales and fables, my drawings try to give us back the sense of wonder and to open doors to a magical world where everything is possible
written by Muriel Gabilan