"I come from an artist’s family. Musicians and painters. Not always professionals, but art was in the air. So thinking about art as a professional project wasn’t considered something eccentric or downright crazy. Quite the opposite, it was just a normal choice. When I was a teenager, I wanted to become a cartoonist, absolutely not a painter....So I started to explore pastels. It was a way to be a drawer and a painter at the same time. I’d been “painting” with pastels for years until 2000, when I started to use oil and canvas. It could seem just a difference of technique, but it’s more than that as painting allows a much longer work..." --Mathieu Weemaels