Mendy Sylvain has always loved to draw. “I found it difficult to express my feelings otherwise, so for years I learned to draw as an autodidact at the same time as I was doing several studies,” he explains. After several years of drawing, visiting exhibitions and watching reports, Mendy knew he wanted to learn more about drawing. “The first exhibition that really opened my mind was at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I enrolled in a fine art preparatory course in Bayonne, then at the National School of Fine Arts in Dijon where I graduated with a space design option.”
Mendy says he is pretty simple in his selection of art tools and frequently uses paper, charcoal, Indian ink, pencil, and pen. “At the moment I really like rOtring and Indian ink with a palette or a brush. But a few days ago I rediscovered charcoal and oil painting.”
Mendy is inspired by almost everything that surrounds him — a smile, dialogue in a film, a song, a sleeping person, or a pebble. He channels his inspiration and determines which creative process to execute, which also depends on what he wants to express. “If I want to do a portrait, I think about what I want to convey as a feeling, an element that I want to most highlight,” he says. Mendy then begins his sketches with different mediums such as charcoal, pencil, rOtring, or paint. “I then keep the medium that seems to me the most suitable, and I do the same portrait several times until I am satisfied,” he says. “But if I do another drawing or portrait, I draw it by letting the hand and the unconscious guide me. There is always this repetition of the same drawing before the final result, the highlighting of certain details and sometimes more or less hidden messages,” he adds.
Mendy is currently designing comic strips design and working on a series of large format character portraits. To stay up-to-date on all of Mendy’s work, follow him on Instagram: @/sylvainmendy or on Behance at https://www.behance.net/-mendysylvain-.
