Studying color, light, and seeing the world as it exists before me, the Marchutz School has been one of the most monumental influences in my art making. I walked to school every day in the same path of Paul Cezanne and Leo Marchutz, under bending olive branches and through patches of springy lavender— it sounds like a dream, but I’m glad it wasn’t. Aix has allowed me to slow down and re-evaluate how I saw the world, both psychologically and visually, and how I could manifest and embody whatever was before me through my own hands.

My class at Marchutz centered around the literature of Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and Profane.” What makes something sacred, or worldly? I realized that art can break this binary by taking things from our ordinary life— still lives, landscapes— and asked us to study, take in the moment, and look at everything more closely.

Though my time abroad was abruptly cut short, the Marchutz School was transformative to my painting process. From color theory to brushstroke, I learned how to let light into my painting and create color relationships that would interact and animate the surface. Painting and drawing was less about filling in darks and lights or trying to represent the exact moment before me, but it instead became a reflective process on how to capture the sensation and spirit of what I was experiencing.

I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness of placement of the tones, I study nature so as not to do anything silly, to remain reasonable — but — I don’t really care whether my colours are precisely the same, so long as they look good on my canvas, just as they look good in life. - Van Gogh