MY MAN AND...
To be free to express myself and create, that's my credo and my battle.
... ARTIST LIFE
My first job, which took me on the road a lot, was performing as a musician from 1995 to 2008:
- Concerts, tours and recordings, mainly with Malted Milk as a acoustic blues duet (with Arnaud Fradin, guitars/vocals) or as a group, in France, Europe and the USA. We've won awards in France and abroad for the high quality of our concerts. I accompanied Joe Turner, former bassist to BB King, Albert King and Little Milton, for an emotional year with Malted Milk (Joe died the following year). Johnny Halliday co-produced a "blues-country-rock" compilation featuring two of our compositions with Malted Milk.
- Collaborations with various French and American bands from 2008 to the present day.
Short-lived creation of "The 13th Bar", my first variable-modulation combo with the great Sylvain "Sly Dee" Daniel in 2008.
Another luminous encounter in 2009 with Warren Mutton (KO KO MO), with whom we were able to commit some kind of music madness.
I organized or co-organized and managed a few European tours with singer friends such as Karl W Davis and MS. Nickki.
The writing of songs, poems and short stories remains omnipresent in this period as a professional musician. I'll come back to this below...
My growing interest in photography led me to play irregularly, except in the United States where live music is more prevalent: American folks are musicians and/or singers at heart. Just look at the omnipresence of school and university marching bands in every state in the country. With my desire for travel and adventure as strong as ever, I continued my peregrinations on the roads of France, its neighbouring countries and North America (USA: 2002-2005-2007-2009-2012-2014/15/16/17 and Canada in 2019).
Royan, summer 2011: a photographic "accident" occurs in the company of my daughter - in a playful, experimental approach close to light-painting. These manipulations and my attempts at radical adjustments - practiced in the same way when I make music with effects pedals - brought me back and closer to my beginnings, to my first creative experiments carried out at the age of 12. It was a return to shapes, lines and dots, sometimes anarchic, and to vibrant, electric colors: Blew then became my artistic double (Blew being pronounced almost like "Blue", a reminder of my musical roots and my favorite color). For five or six years, I worked with galleries, art fairs and innovative craft shows, as well as 1-night-shows in private homes - Past exhibitions: some of my abstract creations have been acquired by interior designers and destined for major hotels in Manhattan, for example. Thanks to collaborators, agents and friends located in New York, Miami, Jacksonville,FL., Atlanta,GA., Memphis,TN., or Richmond,VA., I've been able to create a vast network by traveling regularly, always with the possibility of stopping to take a few shots of vintage light-bulb signs in front of motels, restaurants, strip clubs and juke joints in the Deep South... in particular. Across the Atlantic, the possibilities for night photography are quite infinite. I was frequently in a state of jubilation with such a feast offering itself to my sharp "night owl" stare... You'll find these "inks of light", as a friend delightfully called them, here: https://manewblew.wixsite.com/blewisblue/blew-cosmos
William Eggleston a été une des plus belles rencontre photographique pour ses couleurs (et son procédé de tirage), son esprit de composition avec la lumière naturelle et sa suggestion permanente de l'abstraction par ces mêmes couleurs et tons. Son approche abstraite et picturale m'a fait réfléchir par ailleurs à la signification symbolique des fleurs et plantes sauvages qu'il a largement photographié : https://egglestonartfoundation.org/
— My collection of floral abstracts: https://manewblew.wixsite.com/blewisblue/video
I had to abstract reality, which sometimes played tricks on me and from which I had to escape. My very first works were graphic and geometric creations in primary and pastel colors. I discovered shapes in color, and specifically the power of the triangle. So how did black-and-white photography come about? A realm without color, a reality with a multitude of colors becoming so many shades of gray in a world to be re-created? Driftwood Beach invited me to try and capture it in black and white in the first place.
As I traveled through America's major cities, I began to take photos inspired by the architecture, the buildings, sometimes made of glass, in B&W or color. The search was purely graphic, playing with angles, dimensions and distortions. There was a desire to purify volumes and lines in this form of photographic abstraction. To show something familiar in a different way...
After taking an interest in mathematics and geometry, I discovered French literature during my middle-school years. First love, first sentimental disappointment and first poetic salvation. Writing one's momentary despair, and sometimes experiencing catharsis. Such was the beginning of my story with writing... My very first reading was René Barjavel's Ravage (1943) at the age of 14, and then again some twenty years later. This first novel is also the first recognized and enduring work of French SF. A post-apocalyptic novel set in 2052... But Barjavel is also a poet, and in this novel we find a faith and love in humanity that is often overwhelming. I say this because you know as well as I do that first times leave lasting memories, and this was the case for my encounter with Barjavel... Man's action on behalf of the Living was a recurring theme in his work. Then George Orwell's 1984 (1949) struck like a bolt of lightning on my cosy world! In the wake of this, I set out to conquer Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Then there's the pessimism that tinged their lives and then permeated mine, not by mimicry, but by appreciation of the facts. Yes, an existence with a sad face at times, a sadness that I admit to. Sometimes... Often... Never again?
During my college years in Nantes at the University of Modern Literature, I had the chance to read and analyze even more books, and in this period, I met Aimé Césaire and his "poetry where lyricism conjures up formlessness, where the imagination of the West Indies, the sensuality of images, the blaze of rebellious words illuminate the dreams and anxieties of a new world to be forged."
Éluard the exalted, Rimbaud the rebel, Apollinaire the unloved, Baudelaire the melancholic, Dante the thinker, Whitman the raw, Blake the humanist, Poe the damned, Emerson the joyful, are all poets carrying original visions composed of pure waters, enthusiastic rivers, mysterious caves and obscure basements. Powerful visions, because they confront us with our deepest selves; grounds for subtle experiments, witnesses to useful existences, men and women, like thousands of artists, who have embodied their singular relationship to the world to the point of influencing millions of artists.
"The goal of art, the goal of a life, can only be to increase the amount of freedom and responsibility that is in each man and in the world." Albert Camus
Selfportrait - Atlanta High Museum of Art (2017)
