Lotus Rouge: We have to connect the people of this planet into a channel where the political manipulations of religions are not involved.

 

 

 About himself Anthony he told me: I was born in 1966, 3 years later Bowie sang about an oddity in space and the man finally conquered the moon on jumps. My interest in colours and drawing was noticed very early, as well the world of comics and adventures in books. At the age of seven Tintin was my favourite comic magazine and hero. I could draw any character from the book from my memory without needing to copy from a image beside. At the age of twelve I have my first artistic experience in participating to paint a wall of the school. And it is there that my visual education teacher advised my mother that I should follow art in a College of fine arts. In 1989, I decide to put my dreams on plane wings and I start to travel around the world I took the college grant and bought me a ticket to Japan. I decide to cut my umbilical cord with Europe heading into the continent of Asia, where I would live the next seven years of my life. Leaving painting for a bit I start to have my first experience in the decorative work and into small jobs to earn the money to travel. In 1998, I returned to Europe. Back in London I completed by studies in Art and Design at Lambeth College in Vauxwell, London. Meanwhile I managed to get two exhibitions in London. In 2001, I discover that I was ill. And in the next ten years I started to live a life on surgery tables and at hospitals. About four years ago, while I was struggling against two cancers, a hepatitis and a deep depression, I start to get courage and my vitamins for life back in the acrylics and brushes.

Slowly the wish of living in colours came back to me, and the wish of painting seems perpetual on me. I focus very much on the natural and urban landscapes, on visual expressions of people, on moments exciting me, places and less common professions of the cancer society in which we live.
Both the landscape and human architecture play a very important role in my visual receiver. From the beauty of the complex and bizarre to the simple and natural, emotions are the main source of my artistic creation. In general, I like benefitting from a visual stability, and feel during my artistic creation, since I am a person who lives visually more than verbally. I need a visual content which awakes emotions and feelings in my soul. This permits me to create and paint.

 

Lotus Rouge: For me art is a very diverse range of human activities in creating visual and auditory and performing artefacts such as art-works, expressing creative and technical skills. I think art is to be intended and appreciated for its beauty or emotion. Art is the communication of a creative emotion. In the artistic field, creation and interpretation are explored in several ways. I cannot imagine myself in a world without art. Art lives with us since Creation occurred. I cannot imagine look into an old cd without a graphic or photo work. Can you imagine to live in a world without graphic design? When I look at the table where I am writing now I know that someone designed that like my Pc, my shoes ….my glasses. All is art creation: my chair, my mug of tea, etc. All functional designs have to be considered as art. All this makes me think that art is both functional and aesthetical and expresses our emotional world.

LR: I can say that at a very early stage of my age I noticed that I was living as part of a divided diversified world and I recognised my position on it. I had to be very cautious about my beliefs and to have the sensibility to use this diversified world as a guide and a dictionary to guide me and lead me to the construction of myself.

It was hard to grow up in a world where domination and fear are the democracies and laws of this planet and where anything apart from art and true love were fake.

So when I started to have my own opinions and colours about this carcinogenic world I start to learn that I had to search for the visual aspect of this world to create my visual world. I couldn’t conform myself with the local informative channels of a city.

Travelling around the world for about 9 years was my final master degree, without a permanent house or street or bar…cutting all the umbilical chords from all I had learnt from books or teachers and friends. I decided to go and see people and landscapes (human as natural) from all around this planet to make my box of colours.

 

 MR: How did your experience abroad permit you to develop your artistic competences?

LR: Travelling has always lead me onto an absolute realism. It is like if you are going to see what is there in absolute everyday occurrence or watch a face that tells you pages of its history. There is no fake beauty on it. But tourism is a world of fake. I didn’t want to know anything about the world of fake, about the art constructed by people to create an illusionary world to satisfy economic and political needs. As a consequence, for me living without a permanent house and see this world as a traveller was my best teacher to achieve my dictionary of colours and expressions for my paintings.

LR: I experienced Catalan Hunter as a mass, universal channel where creation and realism are the major performers, a habitat for artists and non-artists full of life and colours.

 

LR: It is a very delicate question because everyone has different points of view in art…but the project of Catalan Hunter is definitely a universal language achieving the main objectives of dialogue, harmony, and peace. We have to connect the people of this planet into a channel where the political manipulations of religions are not involved. We must struggle and achieve the destruction of all fake.