Every artist I know carries the same personal hope. We want our work to be seen. We want it to mean something to someone we have never met. We want the years spent learning to draw, to paint, to compose, to write, to be recognised as the discipline they are. That hope is honest and human. But it is also the exact place where we are most easily exploited, because anyone who wants to take advantage of an artist knows precisely which door to knock on. They knock on the door mark

How a Zafer Painting is Made: Technique and Craft. A painting begins before the brush touches the canvas. It begins with a decision: what is this painting about, and what do I want the viewer to feel when they look at it? These two questions sound simple, but they contain everything. Before a single mark is made, the subject must be chosen with intention, and that intention must be clear enough to survive the entire process of making the work. Feeding chickens - 2019 I often

What is Zafer ? The Philosophy and Origins ? The word "Zafer" comes from Mauritian Creole, where it is used the way English speakers use "thing" or "stuff": a catch-all for something you can't quite name. When I found myself unable to classify my new style of painting, the word felt right. I called it Zafer, and the name stayed. I began painting in 1986, already deeply in love with classical landscape work. Painters like Maurice Ménardeau, Max Boullé and Roger Charoux were my

Expo 2022 There is a particular kind of fear that many artists know. It is not the fear of the blank canvas. That one I have made peace with over the years, since when inspiration is away, I watch TV while waiting for its return. What I want to talk about is the fear of opening a venue's doors, hanging your work on the walls, and standing beside it while strangers decide what they think of it and of you. A solo exhibition is exactly that. It is one of the most frightening thi

My studio in Curepipe, Mauritius There is a particular silence in the studio after I finish a painting. For a moment, I see only what is in front of me; the colours, the dark little marks, the patterns I have spent more than twenty years learning to make. And then another voice arrives, quieter and colder than the first. "This is not real art", it says. "You are not a real artist. There is an impostor in my studio, and this is a well-known syndrome! One day, someone will sta

A friendly dodo I have always been fascinated by religions and beliefs, yet I have never been entirely able to define what my own beliefs truly are. Even when I search deep within myself, the answer remains elusive, slipping away just as I think I've grasped it. I am not a religious person in the conventional sense, yet I speak to God every single day in my mind and through my art. The God I address belongs to no specific religion but exists simultaneously in all of them and