Sandra Verine

I’m a self-taught visual artist born in New York in 1974.
I currently live and work in Montpellier.
 

STUDIES / PHOTOGRAPHY

After spending my childhood in New York, I moved to France to study Art History and Cinema. During University, I practiced analog photography intensively through different formats and techniques, first in black and white, then moving on to color.
 

EN TRAITS LIBRES / DRAWING / WORKSHOPS

In 2009, I joined En Traits Libres, a collective workshop open to the public. This marked the start of a beautiful artistic and human adventure. I am surrounded by talented artists and meet the public on a daily basis, I discovered fanzines and the passionate world of micro-publishing. I give workshops with children and teenagers in which I focus on drawing, publishing and education to imagery.

Drawing has become my technique of choice with a preference for Indian ink and figurative and observational drawing. Several dialectics intertwine in my work : accident/mastery, dirt/clean, blur/precision coexist.

At the center of my interests : the human face and figure that I explore throughout my portraits and nudes, always based on live models. I wishto convey a presence : something alive and vibrant. My stroke is energetic, my vision precise, shaped by my the photographic frame.
 

PORTRAITS BASED ON JOHN DEAKIN'S PHOTOS

In the 1950s/60s, the photographer John Deakin took raw and frontal portraits of artists and friends from the London scene. I took these photos as a starting point to draw inkwashes on Arches paper in medium format.
 

SANDRA VERINE DRAWING LIVE

Being passionate about music, most particularly rock, for years I drew during concerts. I drew musicians, their instruments, and the mess of cables at their feet. This developed my drawing speed. Drawing in a crowd is a challenge, a game, and a witness to a fleeting scene. SANDRA VERINE DRAWING LIVE consists of 300 drawings executed in small basements as well as in festivals.
 

DOODLES

This musical dimension can also be found in Boucles/Doodles, a non-figurative experimentation in Indian ink, a rhythmic research based on an automatic and repetitive writing process inspired by the work of Pierrette Bloch. The variety of formats changes the spectator’s physical relationship to the work.
 

#IDRAWYOUDRAWME

The ongoing project #idrawyoudrawme consists of a face to face session in which the model and I draw eachother simultaneously.

DRAWING + COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY
 

URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Since 2014, I’ve been photographing in square format digital color photography on the subject of the city. The use of saturated colors, contrasting lights, plays on shadows and light and upclose and tight framing magnify the sensuality and materiality of reality.
 

COLOR PORTRAITS

Color is a new world I have been exploring for three years now. In Portraits 2020-21,
I start with a live model pose and continue details alone. I use highly pigmented colored pencils and allow myself more time.
 

WALK

In contrast, oil pastel is a malleable, thick and vibrant material that lends itself well to my spontaneity. Back from an intense trip to my dear New York, I started WALK, drawn in a dirty and fast fashion. Oil pastel is for me a step taken towards painting, but for the moment I still love paper – especially its fragility and simplicity.

+ In the near future, I wish to draw nature (plants, flowers...) colored pencil in large format.