Featured Artist Fleur Palau

Enjoy artist Fleur Palau’s distinctive portfolio of dreamlike landscape and figurative paintings. Find more of her work on her website.

 

 

I guess you could say that I’m an alchemist of color. The mixing of various color tones to produce something entirely new is my passion.

 

 

Although my work is not in the school of abstract, the process is very similar in terms of the vocabulary of color and how it works. Warm against cool, vibrant color set off by neutrals, creating harmony and tension at the same time is a chief component.

 

 

I may initially draw my subject matter in preparation for the general design. But there it ends, as the process enters into a semi-waking state where color and neutrality vie for balance, yet working together to create a mood and statement. On this level, I am literally working in the abstract.

 

 

I studied sculpture and painting at The National Academy of Design New York City on a full scholarship. There I frequented the galleries and museums. The years I lived in New York City were formative, but none were so all encompassing as when I moved to Florence, Italy to continue to paint and sculpt. I saved for years to do this.

 

 

It was a total immersion which permeated all aspects of visual life from architecture, to frescoes, easel painting and all manner of sculpture in the museums and piazzas. I lived and worked there for ten years, breathing in the visual language. Admittedly, my work does show the influence.

 

 

During this time, I moved up the coast to settle in Versilia and concentrated on landscape, featuring the casa colonica old farmhouses that were slowly disappearing under the transformation of a modern lifestyle. The agricultural community was ceding to the more urban environment. Tracts of land were being developed and my only solution to save these places was to paint their portrait. Hence my landscape series.

 

 

I was also working for sculptors Harry Jackson and Bill McElheran doing enlargements and reductions of their work while studying marble carving at the foot of the Apuan Alps. Painting outdoors or carving marble, I was always under the bright blue canopy of the sky looking up to the mountains with their white-capped marble at higher elevations.

 

 

Another theme that embellished my landscapes and upon which I continue to return, is my Rabbit World Series. I became inspired by a bunch of rabbits we lived with in New Hampshire when my son was young.

 

 

More recently, I have been developing my Humanscapes Series which is study of the interior life as defined visually. I still go between these themes and sometimes they overlap as I follow my muse. Ultimately it is an unknown and unquantifiable voyage! I hope that my work will inspire and give joy to all those who are in search of truth and beauty.

 

Fleur Palau invites you to follow on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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