Thoughts on an artist’s inspiration
Franco-Australian artist and
curator Camille Masson-Talansier
has lived all over the world, from
Indonesia to Australia to Georgia
and France. Today she lives in the
Basque country in south-west
France. She works in painting,
photo and installation.
Abstract doodles brilliantly coloured-in
were the first inspirations of childhood. I sort of
enjoyed letting them escape and traverse the page,
not knowing when they would end. Later on of
course the influence of stained glass with its lead
definition was to greatly influence my work for
many years.
Inspiration follows life events, voyages, people
you meet, conversions, interior feelings, emotion,
objects, memories. I have been inspired by all these.
My parents were great travellers, living in farflung lands such as Africa, Indonesia and Australia.
Landscapes, sounds and smells of those places still
filter through my inspiration, infusing it with colour
and nostalgia.
My life as well as that of my many siblings was
a va-et-vient between Australia and France for the
first 20 years of my life before I decided to stay in
one or the other.
Australia, its vastness and brutal landscapes
occupied very much my art psyche and when I
discovered the tropics with its Aboriginal presence
in Far North Queensland during a period as an art
centre manager, the change in my art became
tangible. Something like presence entered the
paintings. When I could work at my art I was not
Mrs James Cook's necklace
influenced by my indigenous peers but was haunted
by the presences in the prickly landscape that
oscillated between green jungle and corrugated
aridity. They seemed to jump at me, speak to me,
perhaps the notorious awus were having a joke at
my expense.
Decoration had definitely exited my painting.
That time in the 1990s which had seen much art
being sold through my Paris agent was over. It had
been very sweet. Many voyages to Portugal,
Turkey, Tunisia, Spain, Georgia had laid the ground
for experimenting with colour, shape and media.