A closer look at the Rouge creative process
Can you tell us a little about yourself and your artistic practice?
My name is Rouge, Rouge Hartley, or at least it's the name I chose for myself when I also started working on the street and needed an alias to sign my work. I work in painting, drawing and sometimes installation, with a resolutely figurative and narrative practice.
What is your background and how did you get into design?
I've had a taste for painting and drawing since childhood; I studied art at university (Strasbourg) and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (Bordeaux), where I developed research into performance, video and installation. There I learned how to build a process and densify my practice, but didn't find the space to make images.
The street became my playground during my studies, its space offering me the opportunity to combine my love of urban strolling, drawing and a thirst for activism and context.
In your day-to-day work as an artist, what inspires you? What triggers the creation of a work?
Frankly, everything. I don't usually realize it right away. I listen to podcasts all day long, I write down on a wall in my studio anything that catches my ear. I also try to read a lot, watch the news, listen to my friends and neighbors, walk as much as possible and spend an inordinate amount of time watching what artists are producing around the world.
I have an inner space where more or less digested fragments of literature, cinema, sociology, philosophy, music or painting can cohabit on an equal footing with an anecdote crossed by chance, the remark of a passer-by or the sight of my overflowing laundry basket. They are all likely to shed a sudden light on an intuition.
Can you explain how you go about creating your work? What are the different stages of creation?
I decide to trigger the production of a work when an image intuition intersects with something else, such as a poem, an issue or a context, and thus gains sufficient density to be attempted.
I then make a quick sketch to place the composition in the space of the wall or canvas; I solicit models for a photo shoot, which I retouch in a photomontage process akin to collage, during which I try to slightly disrupt scales or lights to introduce a strangeness, a distracted vibration, and I work on my framing to try to bring a narrative tension.
I then make a quick, small-scale study, often on wood, to define my palette, decide on the areas of sharpness and those that will seek a form of abstraction, above all to assess whether or not I'll enjoy painting this image for several days, whether or not it lends itself to one, if possible several stories.
Then, I paint, with oil on canvas or acrylic on wall, sometimes starting from a very gestural background, trying to sketch only with paint (on a tile), rather brutally, to gradually increase in sharpness and substance with the desire for plastic generosity (textures, colors, reserves...) above all.