Caricatures
The same way of looking.At a different speed.
A sketchbook takes an hour and the wind changing direction. A caricature takes three minutes and a passing smile. The attention involved is exactly the same.
Looking fast
A caricature is not drawn any faster than a sketchbook page. It simply calls for earlier decisions. Deciding what to keep. Deciding what to leave out.
What makes a face recognisable in three lines is not the speed of the hand. It is the slowness of the look that came before it.
Looking accurately
“A failed caricature is one that exaggerated something that was not essential.”
A face rarely has just one truth. It has several, and they do not always sit together. An accurate caricature invents nothing: it picks the one that, on that particular day, looks most like the person.
It calls for the same rigour as a Breton landscape drawn at Conguel — except here, the landscape moves, talks, laughs, and walks off with the page.
Looking kindly
A caricature can wound. That is often even what people expect of it. I prefer the opposite: that the person walks away feeling seen, not mocked.
That does not mean softening it. It means looking first — really looking — before choosing the line. The smile that appears at the end is an agreement, not a concession.
A successful caricature gets two laughs: the bystander first, and the person themselves a few seconds later.
Caricatures drawn live, published with the artist's agreement. Only protected web reproductions are shown.
Where this way of looking is put to use
The pen is put to work wherever faces gather: weddings, birthdays, family celebrations; company evenings, seminars, retirement send-offs; trade fairs, openings, public events. A caricature is also sometimes commissioned in the studio, from a photograph, as a gift.
These are not different contexts. They are different occasions for the same gesture.
A sketchbook keeps what passes. A painting holds what remains. A caricature gives away what has just been born.
Three ways of looking — one single gaze.