My decision to paint walls inside the house I took from Jean Cocteau. In the 1950s, he spent many holidays as guest of Alec and Francine Weisweiller in their villa Santo Sospir in Cap Ferrat, Cote d`Azur in France. Used only as a holiday home, the walls of the house were empty. A few days after his arrival, Cocteau said: “I’m tired of idleness, I wither here…” He asked Francine whether he could draw the head of Apollo above the fireplace in the living room. Inch by inch, Cocteau tattooed with frescoes all the walls of the house.
Being not as skilled as Jean Cocteau, I decided to work in a more formal manner of a Jugendstil design framing a mirror. I needed a long ladder (the room is three metres high) and lots of mathematical calculations to get the floral design symmetric to some degree. Initially I painted the pattern directly on to the wall. Later I decided to turn it into a negative, painting the background and leaving the image in cream like the surrounding walls.