I come from a family with a particular destiny.
My dad was part of French resistance and deported to Auschwitz and mother was marked with a yellow star during France’s dark hours of Nazi occupation.
Above and beyond lesions caused by such trauma, these images of darkness, my parents remained silent on these events so that my brother and I had love and hope, living a better life based on respect and human dignity.
I am a humanist deep inside of Jewish tradition. Always taking the best my parents offered, I tried to carry their message of humanism forward.
My path to painting started with my first drawings at the age of 18. My career start as an artist-illustrator for the press and publishing houses, also took me to advertising campaigns.
Inspired by my origins, my paintings were born out of shtetls moods representing small Jewish villages of Russia and Poland. Accents of violin or clarinet. Klezmer music. Derived from writings of Haïm Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chagall or Soutine paintings.
Gradually, through my travels, my themes were diversified. I realized progressively that the world is our planet and that we are all its inhabitants.
These themes become extended invitations to travel… Everything is an excuse to color and the discovery of new horizons. Maybe I always took the present as a gift, the past as a lesson and the future as a joke.
“Only the appearance of innocence is serious… That’s why you paint birds so well. That’s why the smallest vignettes of life become profound and meaningful under your brush: a Parisian terrace, a game of cards, a corsair ship cabin, a beautiful portrait of a woman…A message is contained in the work: the freedom of interpretation of the onlooker is as full as the one put in the creation. And since you are the artist and influencer, we follow your heart where it leads us.”
With these few lines, Nathalie Salmon traces a path that I wish to be the spine of my thinking. Never confine the observer to only one interpretation, offer the possibility for personal and relative observations of my art.
Painting is like music at the crossroads of a multitude of cultures. It is springtime. Like many hands opening up---hearts revealing themselves.
Painting is an eternal beginning. It questions itself. It is, beyond emotional response, the reaction it must induce.
D.K.