I was born in Provence but also lived in different parts of France and Africa during my childhood. Yamashiro Onsen in the western prefecture of Ishikawa Japan has been my home since 2006. I have no artistic background other than a keen interest for arts and aesthetics that I started to develop through the prism of music and cinema.
A self-taught pianist, I started to play at the age of 15 with a predilection for the piano repertoire from the beginning of the 20th century and the works of composers the likes of Erik Satie, Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel. Owing to comprehensive reading about the time and lives of these musicians, I became increasingly familiarized with the various artistic movements that flourished at the time, from symbolism and impressionism to surrealism and abstraction. This has been the breeding ground for my artistic inspiration.
Around 2012, I started working on a series of small pencil sketches called Satie's Ballade based on old Paris photographs with silhouettes of the composer Erik Satie chasing a roaming cat. I enjoyed exploring through this series some of the themes that have continuously inspired me such as music, solitude and deserted spaces mysteriously accentuated by contrasts of light and shadow as best exemplified in the photographs of Eugène Atget, the paintings of Edward Hopper and Hollywood films noirs from the 1940's.
Satie's Ballade
160 pencil drawings, 127 x 178 (2012-2015)
Instagram photo filter
Gradually moving on from this series, I was willing to continue working in a monochrome fashion and further explore the expressiveness of contrasting light and darkness. I first became interested in paper cutting through shadow play. Involving the articulation of cut-out figures between a source of light and a translucent screen, shadow play or "théâtre d'ombres" was quite popular in Paris at the end of the 19th century. I started to cut paper in order to design shadow images the likes of which could have been shown in some Montmartre cabarets in front of an imaginary audience among which, beloved artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Erik Satie, or Vincent Van Gogh might have sneaked into. As Japanese art and design were pervasive at that time, I started designing pictures with elements reminiscing of the country I had been living in for years, using Japanese "washi" whose texture matches so beautifully with softened warm lighting.
This video about my work was filmed at my place on May 27th, 2020.
The Silhouette Carver
Shot and Edited by Dana Stribling
Music: Shining Boy and Little Randy played on the piano by Alexandre Leroi Cortot
Copyright Dana Stribling (Archway Films)
