“Jacques Bodin is a french hyperrealist painter who lives and works in Paris. Most of his paintings are made in an almost absurd scale and magnification, so the subject becomes a kind of abstraction separating it from ordinary reality and endowing it with a life of its own.”
Don’t miss more hyperrealistic hair paintings at Faith is Torment: Jacques Bodin
Find Bodin’s website and gallery here: Jacquesbodin.com.
Source: This Isn’t Happiness
“Jacques Bodin is a french hyperrealist painter who lives and works in Paris. Most of his paintings are made in an almost absurd scale and magnification, so the subject becomes a kind of abstraction separating it from ordinary reality and endowing it with a life of its own. The hair, the orange , the herb become a world in itself, a microcosm. He focuses in on the essential the spiritual oneness of his subjects. There is, indeed, a connection between this magnified section of human physiognomy or nature and the universe.”
MICHAEL: When I look at those rear head shots of the women, I do wonder who those women are. Is that your intention?
JACQUES: The human figure turning one’s back to the viewer suggests some interrogations: Who is this woman? Is she the artist’s wife, his daughter? Could it be my wife, could she be me? So if I answer to your question, I break the mystery. I have the key, but I don’t give it to the viewer. I only suggest and the viewer builds his own history.
MICHAEL: Your paintings of fruit and especially oranges are fantastic. Were you hungry for oranges and you decided to paint them instead? They are so detailed. I can see the pulp! What was your inspiration?
JACQUES: Most paintings are made in a large scale so the oranges become a kind of abstraction separating the subject from ordinary reality and endowing it with a life of its own. The orange becomes a world in itself, a microcosm. I focus in on the essential, the spiritual oneness of the fruit; there is, indeed, a connection between this magnified section of vegetal physiognomy and the universe. I try to capture a dynamic form in a static pose while still conveying movement and brightness. This is for the theory. In fact, I really love oranges and particularly orange juice.
MICHAEL: When people look at your work, what do you want them to see or feel? What is the message behind all of your hard work?
JACQUES: “I have a dream.” In two words, if anyone looking at my works thinks, ”Sense and beauty!” I would be proud of this message. I don’t paint thinking about viewers’ opinion. I should wish people or customers could live all their life with my paintings and every day bring a brand new emotion or interpretation.
Find his website and gallery here: Jacquesbodin.com. Find his Oranges and fruits here. Find his Herbes (grass) here.
"You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I’ll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back."
Sources: Quote – Thank you Whiskey River. Paintings – Thank you Jerry Points Paintings
The Last Load, 1966, by Dale Nichols (Thank you Mme Scherzo)
“No man can be happy, efficient, creative at his work when he is unhappy with his situation and lives for another day. All of us are too prone to postpone our living until some nebulous time when “our ship will come in.” Nothing is so apt to inject dissatisfaction into our lives as this wasteful attitude toward the most perishable of all things we know – time. Today, this very day, is the most important time of all, for what we do today determines what we will be tomorrow. Therefore turn all your attention to your labors of the moment, absorb yourself, take your satisfactions from each thing you do, however humble in your mind. Nothing is small or petty in this life. The massive door of a vault swings on the apex of a tiny jewel, and men have become great through learning how to do well the lowliest of jobs.
– U.S. Anderson, Three Magic Words
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Related U.S. Andersen Posts:
Here’s “Take 2” from U.S. Andersen. (See my prior post: Most people only exist, never truly are at all…). Andersen’s book The Magic In Your Mind was originally published in 1961 – – well before Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) became household names. This man could write and he’s genius…his thought leadership is still as pertinent today as it was more than 40 years ago.
“…It is astounding and sad to see the many thousands of people whose mental machinery keeps delivering to them the very effects they say they do not want. They bewail the fact that they are poor, but that doesn’t make them richer. They complain about their aches and pains but they keep right on being sick. They say that nobody likes them, which means they don’t like anybody. They aren’t bold, they aren’t aggressive, they aren’t imaginative; mental they quiver and quake and are bound to negative delusions. It simply doesn’t matter what the picture in your mind is, it is delivered nonetheless with the same amount of faithfulness and promptness if it is a picture of poverty or disease or fear or failure as it would be if it were a picture of wealth or health or courage or success…
…any picture we hold in our minds is bound to resolve in the material world. We cannot help ourselves in this. As long as we live and think, we will hold images in our minds, and these images develop into the things of our lives, and so long as we think in a certain way we must live a certain way, and no amount of willing or wishing will change it, only the vision we carry within…
…The law of life is this: All things both good and evil are constructed from an image held in mind…
“…Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his famed soliloquy pondered, “To be or not to be,” and thus faced squarely the primary challenge of life. Most people only exist, never truly are at all…
…We exist in order that we may become something more than we are, not through favorable circumstance or auspicious occurrence, but through an inner search for increased awareness. To be, to become, these are the commandments of evolving life, which is going somewhere, aspires to some unscaled heights, and the awakened soul answers the call, seeks, grows, expands. To do less is to sink into the reactive prison of the ego, with all its pain, suffering, limitation, decay, and death. The man who lives through reaction to the world about him is the victim of every change in his environment, now happy, now sad, now victorious, now defeated, affected but never affecting. He may live years in this manner, rapt with sensory perception and the ups and downs of his surface self, but one day pain so outweighs pleasure that he suddenly perceives his ego is illusory, a product of outside circumstances only. Then he either sinks into complete animal lethargy or, turning away from the senses, seeks inner awareness and self-mastery. Then he is on the road to really living, truly becoming; then he begins to uncover his real potential; then he discovers the miracle of his own consciousness, the magic in his mind.
Mastery over life is not attained by dominion over material things, but by mental perception of their true case and nature.”
– U.S. Anderson, The Magic In Your Mind (Book Review)
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Image: Winter Sun (Leonid Afremov) inspired by Michelle’s Post
Live & Learn 