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Camille Leblond was born in Morocco in 1950. Aged 12 he read a book written by Perruchot about the life of Van Gogh which inspired him to become a painter.

At 20 he exhibited his work for the first time in Paris.

His meeting with the pastel artist, Denise Hostallier, directed him towards a form of church- and master-free spiritualism demanding discipline, total self-awareness, objectivity and silence in every artistic gesture and respect for feature, form and background. Image is always an Icon. A painting is the child of a relationship between artist and subject. A painting is alive.
“Nature is your guide and you, through art, are willingly its follower.
You will be lost if it is not your companion along the way.”
Alchimie: E Canseliet, Ed. Pauvert 1980

Ten years of a nomadic life led him to discover lands, people and emotions which remain in his work today. He travelled and painted in Germany, Senegal, Ireland, Kenya and Morocco and, in France, in both Brittany and Provence.

His technique and style changed drastically when, in Brittany, the pastel became his chosen medium. His personal exploration of powder pastel, combined with the particular qualities of the Breton landscape opened him up as a figurative and landscape artist. Powder pastel itself became a source of inspiration, research and subject matter. The particular quality of the medium gives life to emptiness, solitude, silence, the anodyne and the banal. Thus, the work testifies to the truth that everything has an existence, a light and a rhythm.

His subjects – portraits, figures, objects and landscapes- coming from his everyday surroundings- are of familiar and intimate things.

Camille Leblond’s paintings give off a sense of nostalgia, perhaps disconcerting and as subtle as the pastel itself: both revealing and concealing.
“Because Painting is Silence itself, it speaks for itself; it is a mystery. One must be content with looking at and, paradoxically, listening to it.”
(Interview with Scheherazade Alaoui for Le Matin, Casablanca, 24th.April, 1997)

During the past 40 years Camille Leblond’s work has been bought for numerous collections both in France and internationally.

He has had a number of prestigious personal exhibitions, notably in Fez, his birthplace, in 1997, organised by the Batha Museum and in 1999 in Tréguier, the Breton town which welcomed him for more than 20 years, where a retrospective show of more than 200 works was organised for him. Also, in 2000 “Pastels de Provence” in Valréas received the support of the Conseil Général de Vaucluse.

In 1988 the Sociétés Internationales de Pastel awarded him the first prize on the occasion of the Exposition Internationale de Compiègne thus giving him international recognition.

Ventoux brumeux

2005
pastel
65x50

Entrechaux

2003
pastel
41x25

Le Ventoux à Vinsobres

2006
pastel
50x31

Ventoux le Géant de Provence

2005
pastel
50x31

Après la pluie

2005
pastel
33x20

Ventoux dans les nuages

2004
pastel
25x16

Ventoux après la pluie

2006
pastel
50x31

Ventoux

2006
pastel
41x25