Fabienne Verdier: A Practice Shaped by Motion

Every morning at 8 AM, no matter the weather, Fabienne Verdier meets her assistant in her capacious studio in Vexin, in the French countryside, northwest of Paris. Then, for a physically taxing four or five hours, Verdier labors over her expansive canvases using her signature combination of Western and Eastern techniques.

“I have a really monastic organization each day,” says Verdier of her rigorous daily regimen. “Every morning, every morning, even if there is a storm. Because I think that even if I don’t have inspiration, I learn something from every session.” The studio she faithfully attends each day, built in 2005 and designed by architect Denis Valode, was planned to accommodate her particular practice. It contains the cache of bespoke tools she has spent decades adapting to the needs of her abstract paintings, in which she seeks to capture a sense of movement and impermanence. “My job as a painter is about looking, observing nature, and becoming aware that everything around us is in constant motion, nothing is static, everything is shifting, everything is changing,” Verdier explains. “The very principle of life is this constant evolution, and the challenge for the painter is, in my view, to convey this movement of all things.”

The largest of her personalized tools are her paintbrushes — oversized horsehair brushes attached to rails along her studio ceiling, together with a system devised of elastic bands and counterweights. These instruments are subject to the same gravitational forces that govern the movement of the objects that Verdier looks to for inspiration. She believes that incorporating this fundamental physical law into her painting technique is a way to tap into and express what she refers to as the “poetry of the world.”

The poetic forms she wishes to evoke with these brushes are things like the flickers of auroras, rhizomes of a plant, cloud formations, volcanic lava, the course of a river, or the cascade of a waterfall. A mountain range and the stars in the sky. The ebb and flow of the tides.

Verdier commissioned her first set of oversized paintbrushes from artisans in China — where she spent a decade studying at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute — and from calligraphy and painting masters she tracked down after completing her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse. As a young art student, Verdier wanted to learn how to paint birds in flight and was inspired by Chinese and Japanese painters able to express vitality with very few brushstrokes. A teacher suggested that she could learn to master spontaneous brushwork by going to Asia. The first custom horsehair brushes she commissioned from artisans outside Shanghai were inspired by traditional Chinese brushes but made larger — initially 30 centimeters in diameter, later 50 centimeters. Their size affected not only the dimensions of the marks they could make but also allowed them to hold an extraordinary amount of paint, functioning as a kind of cartridge or well.

“I reckoned that if I could invent tools that I wouldn’t need to refill, I could paint a shape on the canvas that, in its initial attack, its development, and its final curve, could be executed with the most natural fluidity and continuity of flow possible,” shares Verdier. Later on, she customized some of these brushes further by cutting off their handles and replacing them with bicycle handlebars. “This two-handed grip, at right angles to the brush, enabled me to paint curves and shapes whose volume can be seen on the flat surface of the canvas.” Another tool she has developed to enable the long, continuous gestures in her paintings is a sort of paint well or piping nozzle, used entirely in place of a paintbrush. In a technique that Verdier calls “Walking Painting,” she conducts these funnels like musical instruments, as paint continuously flows through them and records her movements around the canvas. In this dynamic choreography, she controls the paint and is seldom forced to pause the duet.

Apart from her brushes, Verdier says that the most indispensable items in her studio are somewhat unexpected: a large soft pastel stick, a bucket of water, and a big brown sponge. She uses these tools to map out, erase, and refine what she will paint later. “In my compositions, I am seeking a harmony between balance and imbalance so that emptiness can become intertwined with fullness. The notion of emptiness is essential for me,” she explains. “Shape is defined by the emptiness that brings it into being.”

After an intense morning of painting, Verdier retreats to her library to recover, restore her spirit, take inspiration, and study. It is there where her ideas usually begin to take shape; the space is filled with books by poets, scientists, and philosophers, as well as curiosities such as shells, fossils, and antique Chinese calligraphy brushes. Afternoons in her library are also spent sketching fragments of images and jotting down notes and thoughts in large studio notebooks, some of which she has already published.

“Before settling on a specific shape or subject, I need to study it in depth to see how my predecessors, in other cultures and at other times, tackled the issue,” says Verdier of her process. “In this sense, I work a bit like a researcher in a laboratory.”

Verdier’s current “laboratory project” is about the search for ways to depict light. In infinitely varied polyptychs, she uses the prismatic colors of the rainbow to paint horizons, sunrises, and sunsets. “This spectrum of light is the signature of planet Earth within the universe. For me, it is the DNA of our mental images,” she says of her spectral palette. These paintings seek to capture moments when light bathes a space after the sun has risen, or makes its final appearance after the sun has set.

It is a challenge Verdier wrestles with daily in her sunlit studio. Every morning, every morning, even if there is a storm.

Fabienne Verdier is represented by TEFAF exhibitor Waddington Custot.