Pirogues in Mont-Choisi - 2024 People often speak about art as if it were the last thing you add to a country, a little decoration once the serious work is done. I have spent more than forty years painting, and I have come to believe the opposite. Art and culture are not the icing. In many of the most successful countries on earth, they are part of the foundation. They build cities, fill hotels, create jobs, and give a country a face the whole world can recognise. I want to w

I have never hidden the fact that I live with bipolar disorder. What I have not talked about as openly is what the medication does to me, and what I have had to invent, physically and mentally, to keep painting anyway. This is the story of living with bipolar disorder and painting with the side effects of medication. Self-portrait - 2021 The hands that shake. One of the side effects of my medication is tremor. I take three different medicines twice daily to control my moods.

People sometimes assume that after twenty years of working in my Zafer style, the painting must come easily now. They imagine that the colours fall into place, that the little circles and triangles and dots arrange themselves without effort, and that a painter who has done this for two decades has somehow moved beyond the stage of getting things wrong. I wish I could tell them this is true. The honest answer is that there is not a single painting of mine that does not go wron

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