Delphine Labedan

Born in Pau (Aquitaine), Del­phine now lives and paints in Em­pordà, where the north­ern wind and the light of the area fills her daily life. With a mother who stud­ied Fine Arts and a pho­tog­ra­pher fa­ther, it is not so strange that Del­phine should turn out to be an artist from head to toe. Her work shows a marked ori­en­tal in­flu­ence and the sub­tilty and beauty of her draw­ings lead us into a world filled with magic and fan­tasy.

She likes to paint on large sur­faces of can­vas or wood, and uses dif­fer­ent tech­niques, such as char­coal, pas­tels, col­lage, ink, wa­ter­color and paint­ing, with a pref­er­ence for a mixed-oil tech­nique. Aside from her work as an il­lus­tra­tor, she is presently teach­ing draw­ing and paint­ing at the fine arts school in Salt (EMBA).

Del­phine in­vited Cat­alo­nia Today into her stu­dio lo­cated be­tween Al­beres and Gavar­res, be­tween the sea and the moun­tains, in Em­pordà.

1 - Brushes: Her most com­mon tool of the trade. There are all types: broad, thin, Chi­nese brushes. They are an ex­ten­sion of her hand.

2 - Books: She reads a lot, search­ing out im­ages nd in­spi­ra­tion. She likes to turn over the pages of real books rather than read on the In­ter­net.

3 - A wine bot­tle: She likes wine, but also mak­ing de­signs for la­bels, like this one on the table, a wine from Em­pordà. It is the sec­ond label she has done.

4 - Com­puter: a tool she uses to fin­ish the draw­ings: re­touch­ing, adding con­trasts, crop­ping and adding tex­tures if nec­es­sary.

5 - Cam­era: Pho­tograph­ing her work is a part of the cre­ative process. She takes pic­tures of the im­ages so that she can see things that have slipped past her, er­rors and de­fects. It gives an­other per­spec­tive.

6 - Paper: This is very im­por­tant. She ad­mits she loves the hand­made Aquar­ium paper from Bany­oles. It has a fan­tas­tic tex­ture and qual­ity, and is made to mea­sure. She works only with this paper.

7 - Train­ers: She needs to run every morn­ing be­fore work un­less the tra­mon­tana wind is too strong or if it is rain­ing. It is a rit­ual that has be­come nec­es­sary and al­lows her to con­cen­trate for longer.

8- Wa­ter­colour: Her basic tech­nique is wa­ter­colour, al­though she also works with other tech­niques, such as acrylics, char­coal and oils. As for colours, she has a pref­er­ence for red, green, turquoise, black, and strong im­ages with colours like pur­ple, pink and yel­low. It is a mat­ter of taste.

9- Sto­ries: One of the jobs she likes most is il­lus­trat­ing sto­ries.

10 - Cello: She loves music and learned to play the gui­tar when she was young. He also plays the lute and the cello.