page_title: Francis Bernard (artist)
section_title: Guiding principle and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Bernard (artist) / Work / Guiding principle and influences
caption_attribution_description: "AMERICA", traitement graphique du poème de Michèle Lalonde par Francis Bernard
context_page_description: Francis Bernard born in Paris in 1928 is a painter, a multimedia artist and the author of textimages.
context_section_description: The importance of line and color already became essential to him in his childhood, through the pages of a two-volume dictionary of mythology, one of the few books in the family home.
  Plates of statues from a Berlin museum illustrate the book. All are line engraved and this technique would influence the artist throughout his life.
  At the end of the war, Bernard became enthused by color and visited every gallery in the Latin Quarter. It is during these visits that he determines to become a painter.
  The father of a friend, knowing his passion for painting offers him his first box of oil paints and a period of copying works from the impressionist period commences.
  He spends a year in the studio of  André Lhote, whose "Treatise on Figure" and a "Treatise on Landscape" he had read. Lhote highlights the underlying geometric lines on which a work depends and this will become a lifelong guiding principle to the artist · .
caption: A billboard of "AMERICA"
exif: {}