Grand-Father’s Writing Machine, 120x200cm / 48×78 in.

I love this big-size canvas. For me, this painting is a tribute to my grandfather. I never had the chance to meet the father of my dad, Louis Delapree. He was a French scenarist, journalist, and war correspondent who died young at the end of 1936, on his way back with explosive press articles from the Spanish Civil War to Paris. In the Volunteer, Martin Minchom reported many facts related between him to Picasso, and other French major intellectuals of his time as Aragon, Paul Eluard, etc, in a 23 November 2010 article although my grandfather was not really famous. J.B. Romeiser hailed him 40 years ago as a precursor of the “new journalism” of the 1960s in the way he broke down the separation between self and subject, sacrificing total objectivity to empathy. He was an acknowledged influence on Virginia Woolf, who kept a copy of “The Martyrdom of Madrid”, a book of my nearly forgotten granddad, among her press cuttings while she wrote “Tree Guineas”. Louis Delapree spirit also presides over Andre Malraux’s novel “L’Espoir”. There are numerous echoes of his writing in the novel, with some of my grandfather’s passages even inserted verbatim. He let a book “Mort a Madrid”.

Anyway, I painted this artwork thinking about my too young and too soon dead grandfather.