Paul Surtel is a French painter and epistolier, the son of a family of
coffee makers and restaurateurs living in the Paris region. Fernand
Maillaud, the "good master", a landscape painter, very good friend of
Paul's father, introduced him very early to painting. In1904, Paul
Surtel went up to Paris,at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Arts
Décoratifs, but especially at the "l'école buissonnière", visiting
museums and exhibitions in the galleries of Paris instead to go to
school ! He then became passionate for Rembrandt and especially Corot
(who greatly influenced him).
At the end of the First World War, he was enlisted as an artilleryman
(at the beginning of 1917). From Seine and Marne in Lorraine, Belgium,
Somme, he went from offensive to cantonments. Then he allows himself to
be taken back by nature, draws, leaves emotion to guide his hand, the
craft acquiring itself by dint of attention and work.
Demobilized in Hyères, Paul found a forestry foreman occupation in the
Var, and discovered the Provençal nature that would become the source of
his work and would make him known as a "regionalist painter", a
rather pejorative label to carry in France until very recently. In
1937, during one of his first exhibitions in Oran (Algeria, at that time
French department) Paul Surtel meets Elia Duc, a young teacher in a
small the algerian city. They married in 1939. After that follows 48
years of passionate creation and happiness, especially in Peipin, a tiny
village in the Alpes of Haute Provence where the couple settled. His
paintings radiate tenderness, lightness, effusion, through impalpable
matter. After two years in Quercy, then three in Orange, the family
settles in Carpentras (Vaucluse), in 1951, where Elia is named
professor.
From the 60s, Paul Surtel added landscapes, still-lifes and portraits.
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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
