Jean marie poumeyrol biography of albert hall

Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was born in Libourne, France in The feeling of boredom that always accompanied him allowed him to develop very early an acuity of vision worthy of an entomologist. A gift for drawing, a powerful distraction for this boredom, did not escape the watchful eye of his mother who showed great sagacity by enrolling him in a private lesson.

This initiation combined with his skills allowed him to pass, while he was still only sixteen years old, the entrance exam to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, of which he became the youngest student, and of which he graduated with a degree in painting in and in engraving in He began in erotic painting which brought him great success and fame.

He now lives in Pau and has not painted since due to illness. His work has been the subject of numerous publications in France and abroad and numerous acquisitions by national museums. The world he describes is linked to his personal history and his visual anchoring, precise memories stored from the age of six, his immediate environment, Libourne, the banks of the Isle, his wanderings and discoveries first on foot, then with his little boat during his travels on the Isle.

The world then expanded a little, the banks of the Garonne traveled for a long time by bicycle brought him to the gates of Bordeaux. This territory seemed immense to him when he was a child.

French painters 20th century

He hardly tried to surpass him thereafter. He remained fascinated by the abandoned industrial sites, the locks of the Isle lateral canal, the blockhouses of the Atlantic Wall, the Bordeaux submarine base, all these sites shaped by man where concrete and scrap metal reign will become formidable places in the etymological sense which inspire terror where the visual and the imagination can give free rein.

The paradox in Poumeyrol's realistic, almost photographic painting is that it does not claim to represent "real life": it is a reality deferred and reconstituted only through the filter of memory, the sieve of souvenir and imagination. The term he prefers to describe his approach is that of transfigured reality. His paintings are true stagings only composed in the studio, because he never painted or drew on the motif.