Auge

Aviator, photographer, fabric designer, scenery and costume designer, portrait painter, auto racer...Phillip Auge crowded his life before he turned exclusively to the painting to which he now devotes himself wholeheartedly. He was born in 1935 in Paris and educated in there and in Rennes. His studies finished he decided he wanted to fly so he enlisted in the French Air Force while still so young that he had to secure a wavier of the age requirerments. Auge proved to have natural aptitude for flying, and a brilliant career in that was not matched by an ability to submit to the rigid discipline of military, so he resigned from the Air Force.
Next, Auge turned to photography and the cinema, and to learn their techniques he enrolled in the School for Advanced Cinematographic Studies. He had not yet finished the courses when he met two of France's most famous dress designers, Schiaparelli and Jacques Fath, and was engaged by them to produce designs for fabrics which they used in the clothes comprising some of their most successful collections.
When Auge was eighteen, his parents agreed to let him take a trip to Greece and Italy. The trip turned into a five year stay in Italy, for upon arriving there Auge felt he ha found another homeland whose ideal climate and rich past attracted him so much that he settled in Rome. During those five years he produced scenery and costumes for the theater, opera and cinema in collaboration with Italy's most famous scenic designer, Gilio Coltellaci. Rome's museums fascinated the young Frenchman, and he passed long hours in, them drawn particularly to the works of the painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose technique of painting on wood he studied attentively. In conjunction with his scenic and costume design, he began easel painting and very shortly prominent socialites were commissioning them to do their portraits.
While he was living in Rome, Auge took up auto racing with the same enthusiasm he had given to every other field into which he had delved. A nearly fatal accident ended that enterprise, however. In the accident , his car was totally destroyed by fire, but by some miracle he escaped unhurt. He thereupon abandoned that dangerous sport and turned completely to painting. Upon his return to Paris he enrolled briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Art and there came to the attention of Georges Braque, who encouraged and counselled the young painter. Of his protege, Braque said, "Auge is one of the most accomplished painter of our time and a colorist or a rare quality."