Dominic Durand is a former monk, artist, dedicated to eastern philosophies and martial arts. Characteristics: precise, painstaking, he loves details but also fantastic stories.
He lives in an old stone farmhouse, first a mill and then a studio and home together with his dog Erik, on the edge of a forest in the French Maritime Alps north of Nice.
The only books he reads now are science fiction or fantasy novels and the worlds described here manage to inspire his works, especially those on aliens. His art recalls the pleasure of the scribes who spent months transcribing books rich in detail and so he loves to take us into his fantastic world in which we could get lost without finding the way, but would we really want to?
40a-FLYING OBJECTS
I remember certain engravings by Dürer and his obsessive attention to detail but I assure you it is not a mania but a necessity of the spirit. One can not seek perfection, after all what is it?, but why let me imagine things that are just as easy for me to do as not to do and while I do them my mind can think about the subsequent development. Specifically in this line I must confess that in addition to Dürer, Leonardo inspired me with his flying machines. Of course I was also inspired by certain structures of Hieronymus Bosch but this is obvious.
40b-TRAVEL STAMPS
Who in his life hasn’t been tempted at least once to collect stamps? I’m not talking about young people, who are interested in other things, but rather about us who are more mature and now elderly. As a child I tried to collect stamps. It seems like collating stickers but unlike it they seem to be a very serious thing. The stamps retain the charm of distant places, the graphic richness of paper money but with a lot of extra imagination and graphic skill. Those who love everything that is visual art cannot help but feel the charm they emanate. These drawings were born by chance and while I was experimenting with old planes I came up with the idea of planes travelling to many strange places. I tried to preserve the graphic aspect of the stamps but without the numerical value or the country. All I needed was the look which I find fascinating like all things collectable.
41-ROBOTIC ANIMALS
Building robots has always needed detailed mechanical designs. I, who try to do this as much as possible, instead I get lost in everyone’s bizarre stories. Are the oddities I can tell no longer important perhaps? Some companies have cheated by placing mechanical parts on real bodies of live animals. I have documented some of these in this collection but ethics does not make the better artist but rather I understood, when I preached, that everyone despises the ethics of others and turns a blind eye to their own.
42a-ROBOTIC WORLD GROUPS
Nothing creates a united group like belonging to the same body. We share screws, wheels and joints, even the same repair shop. The only thing they keep secret to themselves and care about is the joint oil. It is something so personal and intimate that one’s own blend is kept by everyone as the greatest secret. What about these groups from all galaxies? It is a waste of metal, as if more copper or bronze makes them more effective. The secret to better performance is the software with which they are programmed but no one tells them this.
42b-ROBOTIC WORLD-SINGLE AND FAMILY
Let me introduce myself, says one, and tells you the story of his life as if I were interested in the story of the handicapped uncle with no bolts. I would have liked to introduce them to you one by one but I ran out of coffee and I have to fly to Guillaumes to buy my favourite one. Today the weather forecast is terrible and I have to run. Until the next presentation. Au revoi.
42c-ROBOTIC WORLD-OLD TIME PROJECTS
I am convinced that a genius like Leonardo could have developed studies on new machines that imitated man and his structure with their mechanisms. When he was examining parts of the human body, perhaps the idea of making some project occurred to him. After all, he also loved experimenting with machines and what better thing than to combine the two passions? We don’t know and maybe it was too early for humanity. What could he and many other geniuses of the past have invented if they had worked in this direction? It is now easy for me to examine this project and so I tried to make hypotheses and drawings as if all this had really happened.
43-FUNNY ROBOTIC WORLD
These are my favourite robots, they don’t talk or make a fuss. Too bad I don’t enjoy drawing them, they’re too simple for me. Someone has insinuated that they are not my works but were made by Linnaeus as a favour to me. They’re lies, they’re just lies. But do you think someone like me gets help from a clumsy guy like Linnaeus? For goodness sake I love him but he loves modern art too much and says I’m old-fashioned. To console myself, today I will make an omelette with yak sauce, left over from the last excursion made to the Tibetan monks. They are fantastic friends who love complicated works like mine and they asked me to illustrate their Tibetan book of sages, but that’s another story I’ll tell you another time.
44-WONDERFUL TOWNS
Here! This is the line I love and have loved drawing. It allowed me to travel around cities and monasteries all over the world but my favourite ones are the ones I visited in Tibet and the truly beautiful ones are those in Drepung and Sera. But even in Europe people don’t joke and I was able to visit the most beautiful monasteries in Rumania, especially in the region of Transylvania and Bukovina. On the other hand, the majority of the drawings are the fruit of my imagination and believe me I could draw cities and castles all my life.