Like her father, the renowned artist Michel Delacroix, Fabienne Delacroix is a painter whose works are steeped in the poetry of another time. Her quiet, lyrical canvases are windows on the past-that legendary era of memory and desire when life was sweet and pleasures innocent and simple. She paints this simpler time with a nostalgia that seems surprising in one so young, until one remembers that the word nostalgia has its roots in an ancient Greek term meaning to return home.
And home for Fabienne Delacroix is the gorgeous landscape of her beloved country, France. Her province is the harmony that reigned during the Belle …poque, that carefree period at the beginning of the century when people flocked to Deauville, Dinard, Nice and Monte Carlo to take country walks and bathe in the waters off their shores. And it is here, amid the glorious natural beauty of the South of France, that Fabienne Delacroix's love of romance and extraordinary natural gifts as a painter take flight.
But natural gifts develop best with careful schooling and few painters have enjoyed the kind of schooling that Fabienne Delacroix has. Born in 1972, she was the third and last child of Michel Delacroix. To this day, she remembers the long afternoons of her childhood when she played away the hours in her father s studio as he quietly worked away at his easel. By the age of ten, following her family s return to France after a brief stay in the United States, she had already begun to paint. Two years later, she showed her work for the first time at a gallery in Carmel, California, where it proved so popular that it sold out. Today, Fabienne Delacroix paints with her father in his studio, where she has now studied with him for over a decade. Yet, while she shares many of her father's interests, she is very much an artist in her own right. Her style and choice of subjects are uniquely her own and her palette and management of color are marked by her own strong character. In fact, her mastery of her medium and her intuitive capacity to distill the essence of a land- and sea-scape in her images have already established Fabienne Delacroix as a major new talent.
