FRANCOIS BEAUDRY is a canadian artist living in Montreal

Mr. Beaudry left the engineering profession to handle materials such as beeswax, damar gum, chalk, rabbit skin glue, carborundum, required by his attraction towards specific painting techniques. Some of these techniques, pastel and watercolor, he had already known; the others, encaustic and tempera, he discovered them in a book, containing no reproduction, written in a spirit closer to the world of science rather than the world of art: "The Artist's Handbook of materials and techniques" by Ralph Mayer. It is on these foundations that he developed his expertise, on the materials that make up the works of art. He needed concrete references to navigate among the concepts flooding the art world.

Nevertheless, driven by the circumstances, during the realization of his portraits, landscapes and still lifes, penetrated by the thought of Picasso as expressed in the writings of his merchant and friend Kahnweiler (the relationship Picasso-Kahnweiler has lasted more than sixty-five years) he discovered an affinity he shared with these two, who reigned over the art of the twentieth century, in their position firmly against abstraction. Afterwards, driven by the same forces, he fell on the book ABSTRACTION and EINFÜHLUNG written by a contemporary of Kahnweiler : Wilhelm Worringer. With Worringer, the Egyptian pyramid, the pediment of a Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral are only different results of transformations coming from a single source: abstraction. With Kahnweiler, in an artistic movement, abstraction is a useless detour, with Worringer, abstraction can lead to a great style. The antinomy cannot be more direct. In short, the painter who began his career carry away by a lyrical impulse discovered an aesthetic conflict. This conflict, which has never been resolved (a summary of this conflict can be found here), was to capture his mind for several years.

He went through these authors and discovered few others, including Alois Riegl, whom he particularly likes. What began by conducting research on the power of expression of abstraction was to be transformed into research on the process of metamorphosis of art from antiquity to today. Why spend his time and energy in such research? Because he is convinced that art is something that can be understood, even if for many, art comes down to a matter of taste or worse: the demonstration of a refined mind. Above all, comprehension is the vehicle par excellence available to all, even a painter, to discover a fertile country.