Bob Breneur - Illustrateur

Self-employed. Hyperrealistic black pencil drawings. Paintings.
Work from photographs. Line drawing with graphite pencils. Fading and erasing.

In artistic fields, it's not so much the training that's important as the encounters with inspiring personalities. It was their view of my work that reassured me when I started out. And then, successive commissions kept me going. Since leaving art school, I've never stopped progressing. It's like climbing Jacob's Ladder. When I retire, I'm not far from paradise.
As far as technique is concerned, I learned the basics at art school, but that wasn't enough to make me a good illustrator. I had to clear the ground and proceed by failure/success. I never hesitated to tackle a technique I knew nothing about. Each time, I started by buying books on the technique I wanted to learn. Then I bought the equipment. This was an important investment for me, as it meant that I had to make it profitable through customer orders. When the Internet didn't exist, I had to buy all the documentation I needed. Today, I can access everything I'm looking for at the click of a button.
Because, let's face it, I need a model to properly draw the subject I'm interested in. In ancient times, painters used live models. Nicolas Poussin made cardboard models. Vermeer used the darkroom to reproduce his environment. I use a camera to capture my subject, then a video projector to transpose it onto paper. This saves me precious time, because it takes me a whole week to finalize my project.
Nowadays, a lot of artists can't draw, so they go for abstraction. That's fine, it lets their imagination run wild. But a good pencil stroke always attracts attention. I never wanted to follow the sirens of fashion and do contemporary. Not only do I know how to draw, but nothing pleases me more than when my drawing resembles the model. It gives me great pleasure to work on a reflection, a shadow, a detail. The more I look at my model, the more I discover almost invisible details. Sometimes I have to step back to avoid falling into an obsessive search for reality. After all, art is nothing less than a reflection of reality."