THE GOVERNING PRINCIPLE OF MARIE

Marie de Troostembergh wields her camera as she once wielded a paint brush, finding digital photography to be her ideal artistic medium. She approaches every picture with a painter’s eye for light, colour and composition and believes that an image should tell a story, revealed by the way the eye travels around it, discovering detail. Not limited to landscapes and horses, her commissions include interiors, nature, lifestyle, still life and pets-anything that the eye of an artist can encompass.

Two forces have shaped Marie’s life, a love of art and a thirst for the 
unconventional. The latter perhaps stems from having grown up in the mysterious city of Tangier, where the flourishing, rather Bohemian expatriate community included such personalities as Paul Bowles and Randy Weston. Who else has: built a full-size replica of a dinosaur skeleton, lived in that fabled New York counterculture hangout, the Chelsea Hotel, spent years sailing the South Seas or exploring the Spanish Main in a small yacht (she later married the skipper) and finally, has established and run a successful painting business in Marbella for twenty years? 

The other force is art. She views photography as the culmination of a long process of artistic development, starting with Art School in Brussels. In New York she studied painted Finishes and served an apprenticeship in restoration of polycromed and lacquered antiques. At the American Museum of Natural History, she joined the department of restoration of anthropological artefacts (hence the dinosaur).In Spain, after several years of developing painting techniques she set up POLIXROMIA, a company specialising in interior painting including murals and trompe l’oeil effects.

She became seriously interested in photography on her second sailing voyage, during which she and he husband published a blog of their travels. Alerted to the artistic possibilities of digital photography, she spent two years studying the necessary technique and attended several courses on the subject. Thus armed, she has found a satisfying medium in which to creatively express her long-matured aesthetic sensibility.