I was born in Nice in a family of painters. My parents taught me a lot, although I didn't have a formal art education. I studied sailing, Oriental languages, judo, and it was only at the age of 26 that I decided to take up art.
Around the end of 1947 or beginning of 1948, I discovered the book "La Cosmogonie des Rose-Croix" ("The Cosmogony of the Rosenkreuzers"), which became my desktop book — for the next four or five years I studied it daily.
I hitchhiked around Europe. I visited Italy, then went to England, where I worked in a frame shop learning gold leaf gilding, worked in a jockey club in Ireland, then went to Spain.