ONE SMALL SEED MAGAZINE Issue #29 Digital 04 THE BEST OF | Page 16

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It’s a select few that are brave or insane enough to dedicate their lives single-mindedly to the one
thing that drives them wild. Françoise Nielly is one such individual: passionate, eccentric, driven. As
SARAH JAYNE FELL discovers, this artist’s unabashed celebration of life is the magic ingredient for this
degree of creative brilliance.
Françoise Nielly’s immense painted portraits exude
a striking fieriness that lures you like a moth. Her
paintings possess a visible energy, not just in
the vibrancy of their luminescent colours or in
the intensity of the characters captured in thick,
saturated oil paint; it is tangible particularly in the
way that the artist herself is so prominent in her
final products of frenzied magnificence.
Each flash of colour in Françoise’s work evokes
an impression of speed, passion, eccentricity. A
charismatic Julie Delpy look-alike stands at her
easel confronting a two-metre-wide blank canvas.
She is armed with a single painting knife and a
table-sized palette of paint that “looks like coloured
mayonnaise”. No forward planning, no methodical
deliberation. “It’s a very instinctive and impulsive
work. There is no thinking about it, just the doing,
with the energy and the mood that is present,” says
the artist.
Then comes a flurry of awe-invoking madness:
fluorescent paint is haphazardly slapped across
canvas with a trowel-shaped palette knife and
cut, diced and smeared like some kind of culinary
extravaganza. “It’s only at the very end that I need
to step back and evaluate the work to balance
colours or volumes if needed. But when I do that,
the canvas is already filled up. It cannot be undone,
just touched up.” Realising that the ease with
which she throws together a masterpiece is a little
disconcerting, if not completely mind-boggling, she
adds: “Creation is a very natural process for me. I
don’t have to torture myself to create.”
So, who is Françoise Nielly? One could hardly
expect the standard response from such a colourful
creative (born here, grew up there, studied this,
worked doing that). “I am an artist and a passionate
one,” Françoise begins. “I am everything and its
opposite: orange juice and red wine, exceptional
and dull, fashion victim and desert island, lover
and child, black and white, but never in between,
always in the extreme.”

And her driving force? “I am an image devourer. I
eat them. I breathe them. I absorb them through my
eyes, my skin and all my perceptions. Everything I
see feeds my inspiration: faces, books, landscapes,
the way clouds move or the reflection of neon
colours…I am full of pictures, light, vibrations…and
from there my inspiration spurts from inside.”
Growing up between Cannes and Saint-Tropez
and now based in Paris, Françoise is never far from
the quality of light, the sense of colour and the
pulsating atmosphere that permeates the south of
France. Creating art full time for more than twenty
years, she is inspired by life, by love, her love for
life, and particularly, her love for what she does; this
is a woman who is artist prior to everything.
“I am a passionate woman and I am passionate
about my life, about living my life with intensity.
That is the way I approach painting,” she explains.
“Somehow, painting may be the love of my life; and
as with every romantic relationship, it’s a moving
territory with highs and lows, fights, weariness,
desire, fire and water. It can be exhausting,
exhilarating, boring, fun, sparkling… Whatever I go
through with it, I just can’t stop loving it. Art is my
life, my whole life. I just can’t imagine not being an
artist. It is the core of my life.”
Talk about never working a day in your life, Françoise
Nielly is the epitome and the total extreme of what
life, to many, should be all about. Someone once
said, “If you don’t know what your passion is, realise
that one reason for your existence on earth is to
find it.” Françoise, in all her passionate eccentricity,
is a person to be learnt from. Not only from the truly
inspirational work she produces ܈