Biography
Born in Algiers in 1954, Françoise Watin grew up between Paris, Tahiti and Algeria. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris, read philosophy at the Université de Vincennes and trained in contemporary dance at the Peter Goss school. In 1975 she showed her first paintings on Moorea, in French Polynesia.
In 1976 she danced with the company of Hideyuki Yano and Katiana Kowalski. From 1979 to 1981 she danced at Alain Bernardin’s Crazy Horse in Paris. Her tours took her to Mexico and Macao, then she worked as a dancer and choreographer for RAI in Milan. She never stopped painting. The dressing rooms, the backstage and the bodies of those years became the subject of the Crazy series.
She works in oil, watercolor, gouache and ink, and has illustrated for publishers and theaters in France and the United States: Éditions de la Tempête, the review Le Chroniqueur, Éditions Paris Méditerranée, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Her work has been shown in Paris, Provence, Corsica, New York and Texas.
She has lived and worked in Normandy since 2019.
“Françoise Watin remembers that exoticism is born in us very early, in childhood, and that we would do best not to let it escape. Her painting is akin to a cheetah, seized at the collar by the brush, poured into the meticulous reverie of a predator. The viewer, too, will be at times deliciously threatened, at times exalted by a solar lucidity.
What binds us to the painting of Françoise Watin is that it promises and grants a gentleness that does not give up. Always between two shores, between two dreams, fixing the vertigo of a memory on faces that are probably of today, or on landscapes that defy time.
The peninsulas of beauty also rise from the ocean of the imagination, and the artist gives us the gift of being happy with us.”