The Garden of French artist Maite's Soul

At Art Alive the Delhi Art Week spans out in a celebration of nature and the beauty of trees in the hands of French artist Maite Delteil.Her treatment of canvasses and watercolours brings alive the love for parks and trees and the harmony of man and nature.

Maite’s mystical trees

Maite Delteil’s works are titled?The Garden of My Soul,?and you instantly think of European masters who created a surfeit of trees in all kinds of climes and continents celebrating great writers like Walt Whitman and Hermann Hesse .

Maite’s palette is a precision filled meticulous mooring that has a deep surreal flavour in terms of what she wants to present. First look at the bouquet of colours and then study the contours. Trees laced with crimson reds, buttercup yellows and verdant greens reminiscent of a rich spring and lush tropicana each painting is a study in botanical brilliance and Darwinian charm. She unconsciously??echoes the great poet P.B Shelley when he wrote:

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share/The impulse of thy strength, only less free/Than thou, O Uncontrollable!

Maite Delteil is?‘nature’s child’. Nature, flora and fauna has been an intrinsic part of her visual vocabulary which is defined by a quaint charm.?The Garden of My Soul, then is a dance of nature’s mirrors fortifying itself through the dialect of ecological echoes.The circular manicured trees are a heady delight in the wispy watercolours as well as the densely detailed canvases.At best her works echo the philosophy and principles of man and nature ,purusha prakriti.Her love for nature is seen in the passion with which she paints her trees and birds and the land that lives by nature's rhythms.She echoes the words of the great thinker and author Hermann Hesse the author of Siddhartha who wrote:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree."