Arts - Artists - Michael Zancan

His painting.

He was born in Agen, south west France in 1976. As far as he remembers, he has always been doodling on his schoolbooks margins or on the class tables, which costed him a fair number of punishments. Attracted to any form of creation, he has mostly devoted his teenage years to computer creation, passionate about programming, and had to wait until the age of eighteen before he got involved into painting, thanks to his exciting street art (not to say graffiti) period. In parallel he has tried a lot of painting technics, such as airbrushing that sounded like the natural tool for switching from walls to paper. He was about 22 when, tired of the ephemeral nature of graffiti, he really started to get involved into drawing. He practiced a lot thanks to various crafts for his engineering school's gazette, party posters or t-shirts. Thanks to the final discovery of oil painting, he finally felt was painting meant. The serious decision of becoming a painter came after his sterile, unartistic, one-year long experience of engineer's work.

Currently, he's running a small webdesign company in his native town. Despite this time consuming daytime activiy, he takes painting very seriously, forcing himself to paint everyday, little or a lot. His personal style that had refined with years is characterized by an obsessive attention to details, which makes the creation of a canvas an extremely long process. Due to the long and intense dedication it requires for him to paint, he has developed a quite ambiguous relationship with painting: the activity that's liberating him from the fast-paced rhythm of modern life and its mind-corrupting productivity exigencies, is the very one that plunge himself into a deep solitude and inner worrying. Despite a colorful palette and some apparently positive themes, he doesn't manage to hide a certain sadness, and a loneliness palpable.