Featured Artist Fleur Spolidor

Artist Fleur Spolidor works in both acrylic and digital mediums that share the contradictions of our lives and our world. Visit her website to see more of her art.

 

 

Born in Paris, France, I live and work near San Francisco. As you will see in my work, I love octopuses. Some years ago, I started a great adventure—painting our schizophrenic lives in the crazy, but very creative, Silicon Valley. My work is the result of a mix between my friends’ everyday life, the history of San Francisco and Paris, Lewis Carroll’s books about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Jules Verne’s “20,000 leagues under the Sea,” the cinematic influence of Georges Méliès’ “Trip to the Moon” as well as “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang.

 

 

Every one of my images describe a specific moment—that strange time when you realize that things are not as they should be—that something is not right.

 

 

“Alice and the Bubble” is about the crazy real estate situation we have in the Bay Area. Houses sell for millions of dollars, even with a mummified corpse inside (true story!) If you find a giant Alice in Wonderland in the house you like, you will buy it anyway and deal with Alice afterward.

 

 

In “Queen of Hearts Shaking San Francisco” I create a parallel between the earthquakes we often have in the Bay area and the women’s march that was organized to protest for our rights. Society needs to be shaken to rebuild itself with better foundations.

 

 

In “Love Machine” my Queen of Hearts is breastfeeding. It’s a painting about taking care of our planet. In the background one can see newspaper clippings about earthquakes contrasting with the scene of motherly love.

 

 

“The Length of My Bathing Suit”  portrays how women’s fashion always reflects society. In this image, inspired by a photograph, a policeman named “Smokey” Buchanan is measuring the length between the suit and the knee. If it’s too high, Betty Fringle will have to change her clothes.

 

 

“Atomic Suburbia” is about women’s status, the California drought and nuclear explosions. In “Operation Teapot” in 1955, the American government recreated suburban towns for scientific testing and then blasted the Nevada desert with fourteen nuclear explosions. Since the California drought of 2011, homeowners have been replacing their dead lawns with artificial turf, giving a plasticy appearance to the neighborhoods. Housewives have only to vacuum the grass to maintain it.

 

 

My work is about ordinary moments in life that become extraordinary, the sublimation that happens with the addition of disrupting elements. They slip into the image as in life, without noise in order to make you realize the fragility of the moment.

 

 

When we look at old black and white photographs, the discoloration and imperfections give a romantic polish to the scene, we don’t see the pain, only the surrealism of the scene. When I start combining these images, the past became the evidence of our limited memory and our failure to plan for long-term future.

 

 

I will soon merge my work about San Francisco and Paris through virtual reality art and traditional printmaking, creating a sensorial discrepancy in the process. I wish to create environments contradicting each other, inspired by the way the media plays with our perception of reality.

 

Artist Fleur Spolidor invites you to follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

 

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