Muse 23: Cover Artist

Le Protecteur ~ Raoul P. Brosseau

Raoul P. Brosseau is a French artist from Brittany.  The ocean is essential to the Breton people: they live with the water, they are one with the elements, they melt into the aquatic environment. Raoul P. Brosseau paints childhood memories of pine-fringed beaches. The swimmers rewrite history, sometimes lying a little to make it more beautiful than it was.

Brosseau explains:  “Water is an element where you forget yourself, where you disappear. When you bathe, you are no longer just yourself but one with it. Time no longer exists. And when you come out of it, you still have that mysterious little smile, at once disillusioned and satisfied, that my swimmers wear.”

Raoul P. Brosseau has been swimming for as long as he can remember; he's also been painting since he was a child—first drawings, then canvases, something he enjoyed doing in his spare time. Raoul became a teacher, a bookseller, a journalist, a press officer, a publicist, played ukulele in a band, wrote detective stories—a busy literary and artistic life.  Then, encouraging encounters led to his first exhibitions.  Brousseau imagines this passage “like jumping off a diving board a little too high, only to be delighted to realize that everything is going well.”  Since then, he has devoted himself fully to painting.

Brosseau's work can be found at Bouillon D'Art, Bordeaux, France, and online at bouillondart.com/en/