Learning to paint Mauritius in1986: My First Contact with Art

First oil painting by Mauritian artist Pascal Lagesse

At first, I didn't know I could paint.

That might seem like a strange thing for an artist to admit — someone who has spent decades in front of a canvas, who has built an entire visual language from scratch, who has exhibited across Mauritius and beyond. But it is the truth. There was no early revelation, no childhood moment where I picked up a crayon and suddenly understood my destiny. There was simply a fascination, quiet and persistent, that lived somewhere in the back of my mind for years before it found its way out.

Growing up, the walls of our family home were hung with paintings by Mauritian artists. I would spend long minutes in front of them, studying the colours, the brushwork, the way a painting could hold a whole world inside a frame. I didn't have the vocabulary for what I was feeling then. I only knew that something in those paintings spoke to me in a language I couldn't yet speak myself. And somewhere in my adolescent mind, a secret hope began to form — that one day, one of my own paintings might hang on those same walls.

It was a hope I kept almost entirely to myself. At that age, dreams feel fragile. You protect them by not saying them out loud.

My parents were remarkable people in many ways. Both worked in finance — practical, methodical work that required precision and discipline. But at home, they were something else entirely. They were lovers of art and literature, people who understood that beauty and culture were not luxuries but necessities. I grew up in an environment where books were everywhere, where music filled the house, where a painting on the wall was not decoration but a conversation. Culture was not something we visited occasionally. It was the air we breathed.

I owe them an enormous debt for that. Not just for the values they instilled in me, but for the permission they gave me — sometimes without words — to take the world of art seriously. To believe it mattered.

From a very young age, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: I would never work in an office. I didn't know exactly what I would do, but I knew the shape of what I wouldn't do. Sitting behind a desk, managing numbers, following the same routine every day — that was not a life I could imagine for myself. I say this with no disrespect to people who do that work, and certainly none to my parents who did it with such dedication. But I knew, instinctively, that I was built differently. That I needed something else. Something that moved, that changed, that allowed me to see and feel and respond to the world in real time.

I just didn't yet know what that something was.

Pamplemousses gardens - 1987 Oils on Canvas board

And then came the visit that changed everything.

One afternoon, our family received France Staub. His name might not mean much to people outside Mauritius, but within the island he was something of a legend — a man of extraordinary breadth and intellectual curiosity. By profession he was a dentist. But that title barely scratches the surface of who France Staub was. He was also an ornithologist, a herpetologist, a botanist, and a painter. He was the kind of person who seemed to move through the world with a completely different quality of attention — noticing things others walked past, asking questions others never thought to ask, finding layers of meaning and beauty in places most people considered ordinary.

He was, in the truest sense of the word, an explorer.

I remember watching him that afternoon with a mixture of fascination and awe. Here was someone who had built a life entirely on his own terms — who had refused to be defined by a single role or a single discipline, who had followed his curiosity wherever it led and had somehow made all of it cohere into one remarkable human being. He was proof that a life could be wide. That you didn't have to choose between depth and breadth.

But what changed my life was not simply meeting him. It was what he said to me.

France Staub took the time — real time, unhurried time — to talk to me. Not at me, not past me, but to me. He asked me questions. He listened to my answers. And then, at some point in the conversation, he asked whether I would be interested in joining him for one of his painting sessions.

I remember the feeling that moved through me in that moment. A kind of electric recognition — as if something that had been waiting inside me for years had suddenly been given a name and an address.

I said yes immediately. I knew nothing about oil painting. I had never held a palette or mixed colours or stood in front of a blank canvas with a brush in my hand. But none of that mattered. I was not going to let this opportunity pass since learning to paint Mauritius in1986 was not an easy task.

The following Saturday afternoon, France Staub's Volkswagen — registered Ad 740, a detail I have never forgotten — came to fetch me. There is something about that image that still moves me when I think of it now. A car arriving at the door. A door opening onto a different future. A Saturday that would quietly divide my life into before and after.

What I did not expect was who would be waiting for us when we arrived.

That afternoon, painting alongside France Staub, were two of Mauritius's most celebrated artists: Roger Charoux and Serge Constantin. I was a young man with no experience, no training, and no particular right to be in that company — and yet there I was, standing alongside painters whose work I had admired, suddenly part of a world I had only ever observed from the outside.

It was, to put it simply, overwhelming. But in the best possible way.

Roger Charoux and Serge Constantin were already well-established figures in the Mauritian art world. Their presence that afternoon gave the occasion a weight and a significance that I could feel even then, even without fully understanding what it would come to mean to me later. These were not just painters. They were custodians of a tradition, practitioners of a discipline that demanded years of commitment, observation, and love.

And it was Roger Charoux — patient, generous, quietly attentive — who took it upon himself to show me how to paint.

Church in Petite-Rivière - 1988 - Oils on canvas Board

I will not pretend that everything clicked immediately, or that my first attempts were anything remarkable. Oil painting is a discipline that demands patience. The medium itself resists you at first — it moves differently than you expect, dries differently, behaves differently depending on the temperature and the humidity and the pressure of your hand. There is a physical conversation that happens between a painter and their materials, and like any conversation, it takes time to develop its own rhythm.

But Roger Charoux had that rarest of gifts: the ability to teach without diminishing. He guided my hand without overriding it. He corrected without discouraging. He showed me what to look for — how to read the light, how to think about composition, how to trust the brush — while leaving enough space for me to fumble and discover things for myself. His patience that afternoon was something I have never forgotten. It was the patience of someone who genuinely believed that the person in front of him was worth the time.

What I was learning that day went far beyond technique. Roger Charoux and the others were teaching me how to look. They were showing me that the world, when you really pay attention to it, is full of paintings waiting to be made. That light is not just brightness, but information. That colour is not fixed, but alive, shifting with every passing cloud and every turn of the hour. That a tree is not just a tree, but a composition — a relationship between shapes and shadows and the space around it.

I had spent years looking at paintings on our family's walls without fully understanding what I was seeing. That Saturday afternoon, surrounded by three remarkable artists, I began to understand.

It was 1986. I was a young man with no formal training, no particular confidence in my abilities, and no clear idea of where any of this would lead. What I had was curiosity, an open mind, and the extraordinary good fortune of having encountered people generous enough to share their world with me.

That first painting I made in oils still exists. It is rough, uncertain, searching — everything you would expect from a first attempt. But it is also honest. And looking at it now, decades later, I can trace a direct line from that hesitant beginning to everything that came after. To the years of exploration and experimentation. To the development of techniques, the expansion of media — from oils to acrylics, watercolour, pastel, ink, charcoal, engraving on copper and zinc. To the long, slow emergence of a visual language that eventually became something I could call my own.

And eventually, to the Zafer style — the patterned, vibrant, geometry-filled world of paintings that I have been building and refining since 2003. The circles and spirals, the bold outlines, the colours that seem almost to vibrate against each other, the repetitive textures that carry their own meditative and therapeutic energy. None of that existed yet in 1986. But the seed of it was planted that Saturday afternoon, in a Volkswagen registered Ad 740, on the way to a painting session that turned out to include some of the finest artists Mauritius has ever produced.

I think about that afternoon often. About the kind of generosity it takes to give your time and your knowledge to a young person who has shown up with nothing but enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. France Staub didn't have to invite me. Roger Charoux didn't have to teach me. Serge Constantin didn't have to welcome a wide-eyed teenager into his company. They could have kept their circle closed. Instead, without fanfare or obligation, they opened a door.

That is what the best mentors do. They don't just teach you a skill. They show you a version of the world in which your own life makes more sense. They hand you a language that you didn't know you had been looking for.

Those three men gave me painting. But more than that, they gave me permission — permission to believe that the secret hope I had been carrying since adolescence, the quiet dream of one day hanging a painting on those family walls, was not foolish. Was not too much. Was, in fact, exactly right.

I did eventually hang a painting on those walls. And then I hung many more.

But it all began with a car pulling up outside, a door opening, and someone asking a young man with no experience and a great deal of longing: would you like to come and paint?

The answer, then as now, is always yes.