My main influences are romanticism, surrealism and comics, which are mostly figurative, but I always had a strong attraction towards abstract art... without ever trying to do any of it. I still feel it would be great to be able to express something without representing anything. To share a feeling with the viewer without them having to identify anything recognizable.

Breaking out of mediums constraints#

Take comics. I am heavily influenced by comics, it's probably my favorite art form. When I tried doing comics, I found out it wasn't fun for me, and that I had nothing interesting to propose that justified my discomfort when doing them. It's the difference between liking an art form and being the right person to do it, sometimes it doesn't match.

And comics, as amazing as an art form they are, have technical constraints built for their economic life cycle. Sizes, formats, minimum or maximum number of pages, printing techniques, serialization, etc. Those "real world" limitations were totally off-topic in an art school context where the goal was self-discovery through art, not making me a professional artist ready for a specific industry!

So what was I supposed to do with this? Well that's what art school is for, outgrowing your initial influences. By the end of my art curriculum I was mostly drawing and painting in

I grew out of my comics influence to incorporate classical art movements, and walked towards a reduced number of images to narrate a story. I was trying to use symbolism and abstract expressionism to pass feelings through other means than narration to the viewer, a bit like romanticism expresses the feeling of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy text: Sublime).

My next step (aborted as I got out of art school) was to start assembling images as polyptychs and turn them a form of derivative comic. And unsurprisingly, Alenchinsky has paintings made of several drawings.