Les fresques historiques d'Andelot I . Andelot's historical murals I.

Four years ago, as I was exhibiting at MAISON ET OBJET a man stopped on my booth and introduced himself.

He was the mayor of a small community in the east of the country and was looking for a mural artist to paint a new decor in his town hall entryway. He had a surface of 2X2 m and and intended to illustrate a local historical event :

the oldest peace treaty we have kept track of in the history of our country had been signed in his village in 587. 

The place is named Andelot and the treaty known as the "Traité d'Andelot".

We talked a little bit about the project and I said I would call him back after having made researches and a sketch.

As I had just spent a couple of weeks painting with famous public artist William Cochran I was still full of the numerous and rich conversations I had had with William . My views on public art had been very vague so far . 

With William I learnt that public art could be a real asset for a community. It could bring people together , it could give people a sense of belonging to a special place and consequently foster local energies and creativity. It could make a very ordinary place attractive for other people, for tourists, and eventually lead to  economical growth and business development.

All this lead me to tell this mayor that he had a great story to tell ( the treaty, even though it does not belong the major events of our history has been tought in schools for  decades) and that it deserved more than 2x2m , that if he had an exterior wall where I could paint, this would be worth it.

He got back to me very quickly, I drove to his place and we examined different possibilities.

We decided that the best place for the mural was this one ,

in the very center of the village, right by the school( the building with white windows and shutters) and on the square were local small businesses and shops had been forever, an ideal location! 

I started researching seriously and produced the first sketches. The idea is simply to illustrate the day the treatee was signed . 

King Gontran, seated on the left , welcomes King Childebert and his mother Brunehilde. The treatee will put an end to a period of wars and murders it will also lay the ground for harmonized rules of commerce and a new relationship between the aristocrats and the kings.

A XV th century manuscript mentions and  illustrates it ; I had the idea of using as a background for  the figures, this was the very first idea:

 ,then, for a pedagogical sake, I decided to put a map that shows the territorial division and locates, on the frontier between Bourgogne and Austrasie, the little city of  Andelot.

At the bottom, I wrote the very first line of the original treaty in which one can recognize the names of the protagonists, Gunthram, Childabartus, Brunechildis and even the name of the village "andelaum". 

details of the sketches of the figures ( many are borrowed and adapted from XIXth century painters such as Laurens and Benjamin Constant)

The sketches were approved by the mayor and his community council .

But then, the mayor started telling me that other historical events had taken place in or around this village :

- the discovery of an important neolithic settlement

- two major roman roads that crossed a couple miles away from the village and the presence of the largest amphitheater and gallo-roman mosaic in Grand ( 12 miles away)

-  two local "chevaliers"  had taken part in the second trial of Joan of Arc

-  a manifesto written by Gaston d'Orleans, son of Henry IV, who temporarily settled down in Andelot in 1632 and stated his political opposition to his brother Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu

-  a major peasant's riot had occured in the local valley ( Val rognon) by the end of Louis XIV's reign and was said, by certain historians to be a foresign of french revolution

- Andelot was also the birthplace of a quite well known composer of the XVIIIth century, Pignolet de Montéclair 

-  in 1945,Andelot had been freed, by french 2émé DB of Général Leclerc, from german occupation during  of one of the most important panzer battles of the time 

- !!!!!!!

After telling me all this, he added that he had started searching for funding and that he thought the program would probably grow from one single mural to ten or twelve !!!

All this took some time and to make a long and complicated story short , here we are, thanks to the incredible energy of Jean-Philippe Geoffroy, the mayor, money has come and we are now talking about  a twelve murals program.

Each mural will be lit and some of them will have an audio system with a commentary recorder by famous french actors.

Two of them , Michel Galabru and Eric Cantona ( former soccer superstar) read the commentaries of the frist frescoes, other big names are about to participate to the project.

Here are pictures of the first one, " Signature of the "Traité d'Andelot", place Cantarel.

 I worked on this project with mural artist Hubert Pintrand, one of the most experienced and talented mural painters in the country and one apprentice Stéphane Leneuf helped us in the studio.

Beginning of the installation, the canvas was nailed on the wall, one half folded over, we are on this picture applying the glue on the left half ( around 10am)

French mural artist Hubert Pintrand, my "right arm" on this project.

marouflage of the canvas.

Lower canvas installed.

Upper section installed ( around 2 pm)

The energetic mayor, Jean-Philippe Geoffroy arriving from Paris where he had recorded Eric Cantona for the "Charlemagne" mural .

Maison et Objet . January .

I am presently exhibiting 10 mn from home, at SIIAM Megeve...and this made me think of writing a short post about my previous exhibition : Maison et Objet, last January.

Each show gives me the opportunity to create a new collection . I usually have a couple of pieces that did not sell during the previous show but I seldom show them again. My big pleasure is to research and explore new themes. Each time I am in "collection creation" mode I dream I had a huge booth and enough time to fill it up with all the ideas I have ...but maybe it is better I have a rather small one , all ideas are not good and viewers could be totally confused by my eclectic tastes !

Here is what I hung on the walls :

Anis 110x200cm

A green/gray version of a Watteau ornament.

Cavale 150x220 cm

A mix of two famous horse studies of the great Leonardo.

Coin de Feuilles 92x70 cm

Just a branch.

Herbier du peintre 100x150 cm

A slightly modified late XIXth century botanical study.

Elegante 120x260 cm

Two beautiful figures of Giandomenico Tiepolo in black and white.

Lady Jane 75x55 cm

A copy of a Thomas Lawrence portrait.

Leo 115x180 cm

Leonardo again and Leo Fender !

Les Rayures 140x145 cm

Watteau always ...the original is a girl, I made it look like a boy.

Lion rouge 35x110 cm

A horizontal ornament that I modified so that it works vertically.

Rêve de Jardin 140x145 cm

From a XVIth century garden plan 

Here is what the  booth looked like :

Derived from A.Jacobsen's chairs, I got those at the flea market for 5€ a piece, painted them black and added wings on the back.

A one day study / Palm Fine Arts class preparation

I just cannot believe my last post dates back to January ( this year...). I knew I had been busy these last few months but I did not notice so much time flew by.
Anyway, I am happy to be back online , I have a few things to show, here is the first one:

I have a mural class scheduled this summer at Palm Fine Arts.
When I teach this type of course I usually do a full size study of the subject chosen before teaching it.
In order to make sure the content is not too "heavy" I make sure it will not take me more than a day to paint.
My friends Lotta and Mats, owners and teacher at PFA, asked me to propose a landscape with a little bit of a swedish "taste". I made a mix based on a Chichkine ( marvelous russian painter!) landscape and a little background of "my own" and stopped after almost 12 hours , here is the result ( painted with Golden Proceed) :

 1- Drawing and washes in Raw Sienna and Raw Umber.

2- The washes are finished at that stage ; the values of the different areas start to appear.

3- Green tones are applied over the sepia tones ; all is quite transparent. 

4- At this stage I "push" all the dark tones and prepare my background for the "Lights" stage.

4a - detail of the central part.

4b. Dark tones are also applied on the tree trunks. The sky is almost finished ( opaque light blues painted through the foliage).

4c. Detail of the central part.

5. Light greens ( quite opaque) are applied.

5a . At this stage I also block in the flowers on the very foreground.

Stage 5a and final touches on the flowers.

6. Finished panel. I guess that we will add some "living" element in the foreground. There is a bird on Chichkine's model ...I would like to paint a fox in the flowers, at mid-distance.

The whole process is of course much more complex than these short explanations but these are really the steps we will go through when painting this landscape. The focus will be put on the values , on the correct use of paint consistency ( opaque vs. transparent) and on the brushwork. Colors are also key to such subject but the technique ( sepia underground) and the palette we will use will prevent us from getting too green.

Landscape are very interesting to study, quite difficult ( many painters paint good figures but weaker landscape ...one could think that the contrary was true) but with the help of a few technical keys one can really improve.

Nice neighbours...

Just before Christmas I had a nice message from one of my clients in Germany : Kuball and Kempe.

They had bought a folding screen a couple of years ago and in April they  had ordered one  on the "Singerie" theme.
I did a few sketches , sent them and after a couple of changes we agreed on the composition.
I suppose that some people from Condé Nast visited their gorgeous shop and liked the screen.
They decided to have it as a  background to the nice  Xmas card they did for their clients.
Here it is .
 Scarf by Hermes, fabric by Chanel ...and my little screen ...and the donkey!

A few more pictures...

A classical ceiling

Last summer, I have been commissioned by a young russian designer based in Paris for a classical ceiling in the XVIIth/XVIIth century style.
After having tried a couple of sketches based on GiambattistaTiepolo we finally decided to find our inspiration in french painters.
The most talented baroque ceiling painters was, to my mind, François Lemoyne.
His ceiling in the Salon d'Hercule in Versailles , quite recently restored, is an absolute masterpiece.Last time I visited the castle I took a series of pretty good pictures and found a good book on the restoration of this huge work of art.
I picked up different elements in this large assembly of figures and made my own compositions, trying to produce nice arrangements.

I have not yet seen the place where the canvases have been installed as it is somewhere in Russia but, for the preparation of this work, I had a very good rendering of the moldings of the actual ceiling.
The room is very long and includes two parts like this:

I did two canvases for each "half" , that is four canvases in all ( each canvas is approximately 4 meters wide).

Here they are with a few details...

 I painted everything in oils of course . All of the pictures I used for refence were not very accurate and I hard a time with some faces and draperies . The hardest part though was certainly to give these paintings a kind of softness or more exactly "patina" that is characteristic of aged oil paintings.

With time, oil paintings seem to acquire a very particular smoothness that is part of their charm.

It is actually very interesting to know that Lemoyne himself, when he patented his ceiling complained about the fact that, in the same room, on the walls, were two large paintings by Veronese himself and that these had a softness ( a patina) that he could never compete with !!!!