Didier Bourdon - painter

Didier Bourdon was born in Senlis, France in 1957. In 1975 he moved to England, and it would be thirty-five years before he returned to live in his homeland.
In 1987 he enrolled at the Norwich School of Art, studying under Ana Maria Pacheco. He graduated in 1991 and was awarded the best figurative painting prize by the Norwich Institute of Art and Design.
That same year he was accepted as a student at the Royal Academy of Art, in London. He received his Postgraduate Diploma in 1994, and during his three years at the academy he was awarded three further prizes – the Antique Collector’s Royal Academy, the Patterson, Royal Academy and the AENAS Scholarship for Italy. This enabled him to travel to Italy to study Renaissance paintings, and to work, in Sienna, with Professor Otello Chiti, who taught him fresco techniques.
In 1995 Didier went to live in Egmond ann Zee, in the Netherlands. During the following fourteen years, he held many exhibitions and became a member of both the Boterhal Artist Association in Hoorn and the KCB Artist Association and Bergen NH.
In 2010, after thirty-five years abroad, Didier came home, and he now lives and works in Belloc in the Ariege in the South of France.
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Didier Bourdon’s allegorical work uses simple images to create various resonances, collected and explored through drawings. The purpose of the drawings is not to plan the eventual painting but is a research process into the content of the image. The resulting painting, which is not descriptive, feeds from the experience of the drawings, growing little by little. The aim is not to control the image but to let the image emerge, allowing the subconscious to rise to the surface.
    1. Various techniques are used; oil paint on canvas, frescoes, oil paint on gesso, oil pastels, etc. The choice of technique and the size of each painting is all part of the process of creating the work.
Alongside this work from the imagination – paintings, lithographs, etchings and dry points – Didier also works from observation through life drawings, which has  practiced regularly since his art school years.
Life drawing, Didier believes, is a training to look, and an opportunity to catch and capture fragments of life - with all it’s magic.