Underwater Artist: Stephane Braud

Right around the corner of our Riad, sits an art gallery which never seemed to be open on our first few days of Morocco. But when it was, it blew all of us away. The gallery looked like it might have been a renovated Riad, consisting of the four trees with the roof open. There were four display rooms all around a marble fountain in the center.

 

The first room I went into was room filled with only paintings of doors. You may be thinking that this must be the most boring paintings on planet earth, but they were actually quite stunning. For some bizarre reason these paintings of doors were extremely appealing to my eyes. Each door had a unique feel to it, and we all had our favorite one.

 

The next room was also all of the same variety, and it was paint buckets. Again, you might be thinking that this might not be the sharpest looking group of paintings, but these paintings had something special. Already stunned, the artist came in to give us the low-down on his paintings. And what he said was he actually painted them on metal canvases to give them a rusty-bucket look.

 

After exploring a little, Stephane, the artist, led us to his subterranean lair. This room was the most interesting one. It was all paintings of scenes under water. Pretty cool right, but wait there’s more. Stephane actually went scuba diving, deep down under, with a canvas and some oil paints, and painted under water! This was possible because of his oil paintings (oil doesn’t mix with water).

 

Stephane then led us to a screening room were he played a video of him painting underwater. First he would sketch out the scene with the paint straight from the tube. Then he would do the actual painting with a metal trowel so it would give the painting a lot of texture. After that, he would go back to the studio to do some touch ups.

 

I learned some valuable lessons from Stephane: you can paint anywhere and on anything and even the most boring subjects can make a great masterpiece!