Moonlight Ghost

A few years ago, the Safadore Salon of visionary painting in Le Mont-Dore, France, asked me to participate in their event with a themed painting based on the bicentennial celebration of the 1823 thermal bath house of the city.
Having been living in California for 21 years, it was a unique opportunity for me to reconnect with the beloved French region I am originally from.
The music piece "Clair De Lune"(Moonlight) from Claude Debussy gave me the inspiration I needed and I soon had a clear vision of what I wanted to do.
I researched photos with different views of the beautiful neo-byzantine interior, and tried to recreate an elegant and theatrical night time atmosphere, where the moonlight serves as the main source of light, allowing objects to get lost in the shadows.
The color palette is very narrow—made of two predominant warm and cool colors—and the layers of mist in the room give a soft, surreal, slightly eerie feeling to the scene, in some ways reminiscent of the old black and white movies from Jean Cocteau, like "La Belle et la Bête" or "Peau d'Âne."