Makers Mixtapes - Tatjana Buisson
Born to a French father and German mother in South Africa, Tatjana Buisson has roots in both
Africa and Europe and is quite happily weaving the bridge between the two as they both get
referred to as home. As a result the artist spends eight months living in Europe, the south of
France, and four in Cape Town, South Africa.
Painting opposite by Tatyana Buisson
The formative years of Tatjana’s work life were spent creating commercials for big advertising agencies in Johannesburg and Barcelona. Time revealed that her heart was not resonating with the ways of advertising and so her journey pivoted to a spectrum of careers including the creation of her own stationery business, freelance graphic design work, illustration projects, high-end bicycle tour-guiding around Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain and working full time as an artist.
Having travelled to Provence as a teenager, Tatjana knew from an early age that she would one day be an artist inspired by the landscapes of Provence. Her time spent hiking and cycling around the natural wonderlands of southern France has inspired the most recent artworks from her latest solo exhibition, ‘Un Petit Accent’. She’s currently in Cape Town exploring the natural landscapes with her plain-air easel and basket full of oil paints.
‘Here’s a little playlist I’ve created with the intention of flow while adding different elements that could break the thinking mind’s desire for logic… gently. May it inspire some beautiful creations in you.’
A little music goes a long way
It was January 2017 and I had arrived in Paris from Cape Town, South Africa, where I lived at the time. I was going to spend a couple of nights at my cousin, Philippe’s, apartment so that I could gear up for a three-month art residency in the Tarn et Garonne region. While Philippe was at work during the day, I had access to Paris’s January sales and I stocked up on thermals and gloves and bought myself a top-quality portable speaker. I remember my cousin’s surprise at how much I had spent on the mini boombox considering that I was spending money on nothing but bare necessities at the time. I explained that with three months of indoor drawing coming up – great sound was a bare necessity.
With my thermals and speaker in tow, I headed off to Caylus to start to draw. I had chosen that specific residency because John McNorton, a retired lecturer from the Royal Academy of Art in London focussed on drawing.
At the time I believed drawing to be the backbone of art. Not that drawing would have to form the foundation for each artwork I would create but rather, I believed that if I had the skills to draw – really draw, whatever that meant to me – I could permit myself to follow my vocation as an artist.
Winter was fundamental to this drawing experiment of mine. If the weather were bearable and there was going to be any semblance of nature around, I would want to be outdoors immersed in the elements. I needed to place myself in a context where being indoors was more pleasant than outdoors, so that I could fully submerge myself in the work, free from the temptation to find outdoor adventures, my preferred form of procrastination.
January in Caylus, a quiet village with around 1,500 inhabitants, one café, one restaurant, a bakery, a hairdresser, a funeral parlour, and a tiny weekly market, where I didn’t have a car or easy access to cultural excursions, was a perfect fit.
The drawing-for-three-months experiment was challenging in numerous ways. Having trained and spent most of my professional career as a practised graphic designer, I now yearned to explore everything but precision. I wanted to create work beyond a brief. I needed to find a place that had no problem to solve. I wanted to feel my way towards the drawing. What to draw? How? And why?
There was a great deal of psychological discomfort for me to wade through.
How?
Music.
Music has always been my go-to resource for soothing, release, play and for inspiration. I can recall a soundtrack to each phase of my life. When I feel a big change approaching on my journey, whether it’s a tangible new path or a feeling of ephemeral change, I turn to Fip radio, Spotify and Soundcloud to create a new playlist and put my sound system to work.
I promptly created a playlist for charcoal and graphite, and one for oils. I’ve since refined my playlists according to energy or mood, such as ‘soft sounds’, ‘electronic energy’ and ‘bounce’, because music doesn’t match the medium as well as it does the mood.
A bit of Moderat would push my energy forward, a little Ethiopian jazz to lighten the mood and then when I found my flow, I’d settle into more ambient electronic like Weval, Rival Consoles, Tor, or sometimes classical, maybe Vivaldi.
Numerous self-inquiring self-portraits still-lives, and continuous-line drawings later, I had created a variety of works that I eventually deemed fit to justify a confident step towards a career as an artist.
Perhaps confident is too strong a word, but I felt that I had some skill, at least. The next step would be to see whether I had the capacity to let the unknown flow through me with oil paints
After this residency I spent the next few years doing freelance graphic design work in the (European) winter and being a bicycle-tour guide during the summers. I figured I would eventually swap the design jobs for my painting practice but I never made it happen.
In 2020 the world changed and the universe cleared the way for me. It wiped all the excuses off the table, and replaced them with tubes of paint. Lockdown meant there was nowhere I could go. I finally placed a loaded brush onto a blank canvas.
My little portable speaker stepped back into the spotlight. It transformed my luminous living room into an art studio with atmosphere and warm sound in the heart of a cold lockdown. The music coloured my make-shift atelier cozy.
I can’t say that I never paint without music but usually there’s a tune playing while I create. The first track I choose is the primer before the paint. It’s like the invisible hue that renders the white canvas tangible and welcoming.
The gratitude I feel for musicians is immense. Their craft is almost critical to my process because it allows my thinking mind to drift into the melody, while my heart finds its way through my hands to the blank canvas, allowing the ephemeral to settle in form and colour.
Melody, rhythm, and sound-scape seem to bridge the gap between focused problem solving and the flow of magic. The right music enables me to be mindful with each micro-decision in a more fluid manner, allowing my mind to focus on the tune rather than consciously problem-solving its way through the process of creating an artwork.
Sometimes it’s about finding the right music to fit the mood and sometimes it’s about finding the melody that will shift the painting process into the space I wish to embody for a particular piece.
And in case you missed out on our other FAIRE playlists - we created ‘The end and the beginning’, slowdown sounds to mark both an end and a new beginning.
“I had spent many years pursuing excellence...now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.”
And in October we created and shared the Faire Fall playlist…..
“To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else.”
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