“The lives of my heroines go beyond fiction”

With José-Louis Bocquet on the screenplay, Catel forms a tandem which highlights great portraits of women. Their new drawn biography, Anita Contirecounts the journey of this first French woman oceanographer, whistleblower, journalist, photographer and filmmaker who dedicated her life to the mysteries of the marine world. A fascinating work which immerses the reader in the intimacy of the one whom sailors nicknamed “the Lady of the Sea”.

LE FIGARO. – Between documentary requirements and fiction, how do you develop, with José-Louis Boquet, what you call your “biographical”?

CATEL. – Relating stories of real people whose romantic aspect goes beyond any fiction requires at least a year of research before embarking on writing the story itself. José-Louis Bocquet begins by researching the character, his entourage and the historical context. For Anita Conti, born in 1899 and died in 1997, the documentation work proved enormous, the heroine spanning the entire century. Graphically, I look for images of all kinds, between photos of her, her own production, as well as a whole iconography created around the sea. I take graphic notes on Moleskine notebooks.

With Anita Conti, I set out to retrace her eternal smile, the liveliness of her gaze, her kindness, her passionate nature, her ability to brave dangers, to best represent her romantic dimension.

Free, independent, persevering… Anita Conti has taken on more than one challenge, to be able to probe the seabed and reveal its secrets to a wide audience. How can we graphically capture this energy, this strength of character?

Each heroine has a little something that characterizes her. With Anita Conti, I set out to retrace her eternal smile, the liveliness of her gaze, her kindness, her passionate nature, her ability to brave dangers, to best represent her romantic dimension.

Anita Conti photographed and filmed the daily life of fishermen. How do you draw the sea world?

The difficulty was above all to be able to illustrate a woman in an almost static position, photographing and filming sailors on a rocking boat. I also had to adapt my realistic style, quite simplified, to the representation of the calm or moving sea and especially of boats. It is very complicated to draw a boat that looks like a real trawler. Especially since each boat looks the same while containing differences in style, depending on the date of manufacture. Living in Fécamp, I know one of the last captains of these boats who went to the other side of the earth to look for cod. I regularly showed him my work and he helped me a lot with the technical details. He was very demanding about the veracity of my representations. He took my sketches and showed me models. I drew with the aim of balancing precision for specialists and readability for the general public.