PAINTER

People

 After a landscape, Errbet often fancies painting "life", movement, sound (noise, music ...).  Then he is taken by musicians, a crowd, the  atmosphere of  a market or a  show.

However, he is not very fond of human contacts. He does not like groups, and apart from his close friends and relatives, he is a little bit "wild". He prefers calm to noise, and the quietness of the countryside to the bustling atmosphere of a town, and loneliness to crowd.

Why is he so willing to paint groups and gatherings?            

Perhaps because he is the one who watches, and he does not feel snapped up.

And alone in front of his painting, he just watches life going by.

His knife tends to be more superficial in his representations. Errbet is probably more interested in the attitudes of his characters than by their faces. So maybe he works less on details than while painting a landscape. For this reason, perhaps, he was sometimes criticized for having two different ways of working. 

So is Errbet only the painter of indifference?            

No, of course he is attached to his characters and you can see he feels drawn to them. Moreover, the way he looks at the boy begging in the Moscow Underground ("A child"), the old man and the little girl ("A street in India"), on the two kids playing in the water ("Near the temple"), the old lady searching on a marketdisplay ("The lady of the market") of men and women bent in the rice plantation, with their feet in the water ("The Rice"), the two peasants coming back from work ("In Bolivia") and so many other people that populate his paintings, is not a look of indifference.

The deep attachment between the painter and them is noticeable.