Original artwork description:

I painted this work as a memory of a quiet corner of Antibes, where time seems to slow down. The painting is called “Lantern, Opuntia, Antibes”, and for me it brings together light, the South, and a feeling of home.

The old lantern feels like a guardian of the evening. It doesn’t so much illuminate as it simply exists — a black, slightly stubborn silhouette holding the space, connecting the sky and the garden. I made its lines deliberately heavy so it would resonate against the sky and the warm ochre walls.

The opuntia is alive, thorny, almost untamed. I painted it thickly, with dense, textured strokes, letting the paint “grow” on the canvas the way it grows under the Mediterranean sun. In those greens there is heat, the sharp scent of the earth, and a sense of southern freedom.

The house in Antibes is not grand but lived-in. Warm walls, red roof tiles, barred windows — I built it from patches of color, without smoothing or correcting. It was important for me to preserve the unevenness, the breath of the place, its simple human truth.
I made the sky restless, almost uneasy — not a postcard sky, but a living one. It contrasts with the stability of the house and the garden. That is how Antibes exists for me: between calm and inner movement.

This painting is not an exact view, but a state of mind. My gaze, my walk, my evening beneath the lantern, beside the opuntia, in a city I felt with my heart.

Materials used:

Oil paints.

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