Environments that Help Artists

Every artist instinctively seeks an environment that helps them create their art.

It is not always so easy to find either the place, nor the time and serenity to create, however. Every artist knows those stumbling blocks. Sometimes they are easily surmounted, other times it is not so easy.

Sometimes, luck intervenes too. In my case, Lady Luck definitely came calling this summer.

For a multitude of reasons, it has become difficult to have the time to spend in my studio, so I have been fortunate enough to be able to slip away for a while to different art residencies that I have been awarded hither and yon. This year, I had a magical two weeks in spring in Portugal.I was then able to have time at another residency, La Porte Peinte, in Burgundy, France, a country I adore anyway.

It is of course always a bit of a gamble going to art residencies.

It may be a wonderful place, with good studio facilities, but the area may not sing or the people who run the residency may not be terribly compatible – there are so many variables.

Until you get to the place, it is difficult to judge accurately whether you will be able to be truly creative there.

Even recommendations from other artists are not always an accurate gauge for one’s own needs.

La Porte Peinte, in Noyers sur Serein, in north-east Burgundy, near Auxerre, proves to be the most wonderful place in which to create art.

I have just spent the first half of a month’s residency there, and it was the most supportive, comfortable and welcoming place I could have dreamt of.

For a start, the medieval village is a delight.

You enter from the south over the Serein river.

At the entrance to Noyers sur Serein, photo J. Cook. 

And these are views from my eyrie perch window in my room.

Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, Noyers, photo J. Cook

Up the street from La Porte Peinte, photo J. Cook

L'Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall), Noyers, photo J. Cook

Michelle Anderson, the Executive Director of La Porte Peinte, is not only the most gracious of people, but her very international approach and wide knowledge of people and places make her able to help in so many ways. She also knows a lot of local people and that means that an artist has suddenly all sorts of insights and introductions into other ways of life in the area. That is beyond price. Her husband, Oreste, runs their elegant and diverse Gallery and does a million other things to make life at La Porte Peinte so pleasant and constructive. And yes, La Porte Peinte is situated in rue de la Porte Peinte - how about that for destiny!

The more I spend time at art residencies both in the United States and Europe, the more I realise that the atmosphere created by the people in charge is critical to an artist’s ability to create, explore new horizons and grow as an artist.

There is a subtle difference between being left to one’s own devices, to work in peace, and being left to be independent but at the same time, being offered the opportunity to involve oneself in the local cultural world, to meet other artists of all descriptions and disciplines and to be psychologically supported as an artist.

Land Art, Burgundy Style

That’s life for you, isn’t it! All of a sudden, there is so much of fascination to blog about and share with the world, and at the same time, there is the quandary of what to do – blog or draw?And there are only those twenty-four hours in the day, alas. Nonetheless, I will burn the midnight oil a little to celebrate a wonderful event that I was privileged enough to share this weekend.

In a green and harmonious forest, deep in Burgundy, France, there is now a magically glowing Green Giant, a living forest sculpture created by Alain Bresson, a noted French artist.

Alain Bresson at the Forest Inauguration (image courtesy of Michelle Anderson Binczak)

Alain has been creating imaginative sculptures that celebrate the world around us for a long time, with work exhibited in notable venues in Paris, as well as Africa and other parts of Europe.

His land art is increasingly welcomed in exhibitions that draw attention to our environment, and in the case of the inauguration I attended, his imaginative empathy and understanding of the forest was clear.

Le Geant Vert 2, Alain Bresson, living sculpture (image courtesy of Michelle Anderson)

The Green Giant came about almost by chance – as Alain laconically and self-deprecatingly recounted at the inauguration, deep in the lush forest surroundings, he was walking in the local community forest. He suddenly saw the two strangely configured maples growing together and realized their possibilities. He had already had troubles with his own village. The authorities there made him destroy a previous Green Giant sculpture, but happily, in the case of the adjacent community of Argentenay, near Tonnerre, the Mayoress, Catherine Tronel, was more than receptive to having him create a living sculpture in the “forêt communale”.

So Alain covered the trees with yet more moss, which glowed luminously after all the rain we have had, and added delicious touches of scarlet to make the Giant gloriously jaunty. Moss globes, also with flamenco-style flowers tucked in to add allure, were hung from other trees to add depth to the scene. At the inauguration, as Alain explained, we could not yet see the total scene as he had planted different seeds in the moss and in the Giant’s foreground. They will germinate and change the effect, and make the Giant an evolving sculpture that will continue living for years to come. Much more fun than a sculpture that is created and then, that’s it, once it is placed in its official position.

As you parked by burnished pale gold grain fields and then walked into this cool forest, where birdsong is the only sound you normally hear, it was like entering a magical green world.

Burgundy fields, Argentenay, (image courtesy of Michelle Anderson)

Then suddenly this hugely tall green presence arrests and surprises, then delights. There is power and whimsy, and ultimately, a deep respect for our oh-so-important forests. Alain Bresson has travelled a long and successful route since he first went walking in the local countryside as a small boy on a school outing. While all the rest of his class brought back bunches of poppies and daisies to the teacher, he brought back branches, sticks and nettles. The teacher was horrified and reduced the eight-year–old to tears with his reproaches.

Now, I suspect, were that teacher to see The Green Giant, he would be of a different mind about Alain’s selections and skill.

Thoughts on Ingres as a Source of Art

The other day, I attended an artist’s talk for an exhibition opening at the Ingres Museum in Montauban, a delightful small town in South France.

It was thought-provoking, albeit not perhaps quite as the artist intended.

Flyer for the Ingres Museum show on Vincent Carpet

Vincent Carpet is a French artist, born in Paris in 1958, who came to art because there seemed nothing else viable for him to do.

His career really took off, apparently, when he exhibited with two other artists in a very controversial show, Masculin-Féminin, le sexe de l’art, at the Centre GeorgesPompidou Paris. Since then, he has increasingly specialized in using an artist’s work to develop his own version of that work, often with what seems to be a very ironic eye.

It was in this context that he is now exhibiting his work in the Ingres Museum Montauban is Ingres’ home town and the museum owns a huge number of Ingres’ drawings and many important paintings. So Vincent Corpet was invited to select a number of Ingres’ works, paintings and drawings, and develop his own reactive work, to be hung alongside the original work. The show is called Vincent Corpet vit au long d'Ingres.

His talk at the Museum, given to a very small number of people, was ironic, rich in facile remarks and occasional honest moments, such as when he admitted getting totally bored with trying to find what else to do and say when faced with all the multitude of Ingres’ portraits.

Another such moment was when he said he couldn’t paint hands or feet, so he simply stuck his hand or foot in paint and walked on the canvas to leave the imprint. His method of work, apparently, is to make a black and white, quick and dirty copy of the original painting, with the canvas on the floor, as one personage.

He then changes to being another person, in his mind, and selects out things to emphasise and reinterpret, mostly with fantasy animals, upside down, sideways or whatever. He then changes again to another person and covers the rest of the canvas in some simple colour, painted on rather as one would paint a wall, it appeared. Only when the three stages are completed is the canvas placed upright.

Vincent Corpet at work

His drawings were simpler and more painterly, but very repetitive, with sexual forms predominating, with a lot of smudging, erasing the black with spirits to get tonal changes.

He had also made the selection of Ingres’ drawings to go with his drawings, but alas, many of them were so faint that they were almost invisible. He had apparently made a very quick selection on the web of these drawings, not seeing them in the original, which was perhaps sometimes unfortunate.

The overall impression on was left with after this talk was that this was an artist who had perfected the game of parleying his skills into a career in the official art world. Derivative and shallow art is apparently quite acceptable, as long as there is shock value. To me, his talk was short on depth of thought, and thus on impact.

Tackling a take-off of Ingres, himself very much a product of the 19th century traditional art world and not so hot on accurate drawing of the human body, for instance, is not an easy task. Nonetheless, the “translation” done by Vincent Corpet into 21st century idiom simply reminded me of the existence of a potentially shallow, transitory and basically ugly sector of today’s art world. 

In essence, the talk became a reminder to me personally as an artist that one needs to try to dig as deeply and thoughtfully as possible inside one’s own world, not to copy and not to be facile.

Not easy!

Connecting the Dots - again!

A few months ago, I read the dense and absolutely fascinating book, "The Discovery of France" (with the additional title in the States of "A Historical Geography") by Professor Graham Robb of Oxford University. It is the most amazing work - the result of many years of research and some 14,000 miles cycled through France on his voyages of discovery. Graham Robb shows how the cohesive nation of today, "la belle France", was far from being either cohesive or civilised until very recently, really until the 19th century. Paris was an island of learning, culture and enterprise in a sea of very primitive, divided groups of people who had little concept of belonging to a nation and who, for the most part, did not even speak French until well after the French Revolution.

One of these groups, the Savoyards from Savoie, a beautiful area to the east of France, in the Alps region of Lake Geneva, had such trouble surviving in their inhospitable and highly taxed lands, that they would send their very young children to Paris for survival, of sorts. This had been going on for centuries, and these young children, virtually in servitude in many cases, would walk to Paris and there, they organised themselves into groups. They were especially famed as chimney sweeps because, being skinny small children, they could clamber up the narrow Parisian chimneys to clean them out.

Graham Robb tells a lot about these impoverished Savoyards, with their sense of solidarity, and their importance to their families back in Savoie to whom they would send money every year. Balzac and Victor Hugo wrote about the Savoyards, with their heroic attempts to survive, turning their hand to any job deemed unfit for others.

Standing Savoyarde with a Marmot Box, Antoine Watteau

Eventually, some 150 years ago, they progressed from chimney sweeping to another tightly knit category, the "collets rouges", the official porters at Hôtel Drouot, the most famous and oldest auction house in Paris. 110 porters, all Savoyards, have the right to transport, sort, store and carry all the auction items in the Drouot precincts. Recently, there have been some "irregularities" discovered and porters have been investigated for serious wrong-doing, something the French do not seem surprised about!

But the wonderful connecting of dots that happened again for me was when I was reading about the clearly fabulous exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy, London, of Jean Antoine Watteau's drawings. I had known that Watteau drew all sorts of contemporary scenes in Paris, not just the "fêtes galantes" of the Royal Court and 18th century French society. But I had forgotten about his drawings of the Savoyards. The Royal Academy exhibition apparently has eighty-eight drawings, divided into five themes, of which one deals with the Savoyards.

The Old Savoyard, red and black chalk with stumping, 1715, Antoine Watteau, (image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

The Old Savoyarde,, 1715, Antoine Watteau, red and black chalk (image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum).

These two drawings of elderly Savoyards, impoverished and marked by hardship, date from 1715. The old lady carries a marmot box, for the Savoyards would train marmots and use them for street entertainment in their quest for survival. Watteau apparently executed about a dozen drawings of the Savoyards in total.

Only such a master draughtsman as Watteau could so vividly illustrate the dire straits of the Savoyards that Graham Robb describes.

Brittany Plein Air for Artist Gourmets - an Art and Gastronomy Workshop, Dinan, France

I have been sending out the first copies of my newly-completed brochure about this Art and Gastronomy Workshop in Brittany, France, planned for May 3rd-12th, 2010. Ten days of plein air work during the day and in the evening, the participants will be welcomed with gourmet meals celebrating the superb local seafood and fresh produce. The text of this brochure is posted on the News Page of my website.

The iconic image of this area of Brittany is, of course, Mont Saint Michel.

Mont St. Michel, Brittany, Rundle Cook photographer

This is a map of Brittany, a wonderful part of France. The area for the workshop is in North Brittany. Rennes is the main rail link with Paris, with a direct train from the Charles deGaulle Airport.

Map of Brittany

The Workshop will be based at Le Clos Saint Cadreuc, a 1633 farmhouse with elegant long grey stone buildings, which has been converted to a beautifully appointed bed and breakfast establishment. Its location on the map below is in blue. Highly recommended by many guidebooks, it was listed in Britain's travel "bible" written by Alastair Sawday. It is located amid wonderful farmland, just a few minutes inland from spectacular coastal scenery, ranging from golden sweeps of beach to plunging cliffs and vast oyster and mussel beds in long reaches fingering into the land.

St. Malo area, Brittany, showing the location of Le Clos Saint Cadreuc

Brigitte and Patrick Noël are the hosts of Le Clos Saint Cadreuc and they will facilitate this workshop and provide the wonderful meals. Patrick is not only an artist himself but his deep knowledge of the area, from architecture to botanical gardens or coastal gems, will enable the artists to go to wonderful places to create art. Non-painting partners will have plenty to do as well. Meanwhile, Brigitte is the perfect chef and host of this most comfortable establishment. This is a photo of us dining out one night at Eric and Pascale Lemale's wonderful  Restaurant Du Colle on the water, in Saint-Lunaire. (Brigitte is on the right, Patrick centre and I am on the left.)

Du Colle Restaurant, with Jeannine Cook, left, Patrick at centre and Britgitte on the right, Rundle Cook photograpiher

I will be the leader for this plein air group, having spent many a fascinated and humbled hour working outside in all weather conditions, in Europe and all around North America. Not only have I loved doing this sort of work but I have been lucky enough to be awarded a number of Artist Residencies to work in this fashion. The month I was awarded as Artist in Residence at Les Amis de la Grande Vigne in Dinan in late 2008 led me to plan this workshop for 2010.

The beauty of the area is unforgettable, and May is the best month of spring in Brittany.

Here are some photographs to give you a flavour of this wonderful area. These photographs were all taken by my husband, Rundle Cook, who was with me in Dinan.

If you are interested in learning more about this workshop, log on to my website, www.jeanninecook.com and check out the details on the News page. Or e-mail me directly at jeanninecook1@cs.com for a complete brochure and application form.

Thinking of the French landings anniversary

As the West remembers D-Day today on its 65th anniversary, my mind goes back to many earlier years along the Normandy and Brittany beaches and cliffs. As a young woman, I spent many hours in those impressive and eloquent cemeteries that spoke of such sacrifice.

It is heartwarming, however, to see reminders that even today, there is spontaneous gratitude in France, not just on 6th June. When I was in Brittany last October as Artist in Residence with Les Amis de la Grande Vigne in Dinan, I was drawing at the dramatic headland facing the English Channel called Pointe du Grouin.

Pointe du Grouin, Cancale - inks., Jeannine Cook artist

It is north of Dinan and round the corner, going west, from lovely Cancale, home of such succulent oysters. While I was drawing in the biting wind, my husband was exploring the concrete fortifications and bunkers that remains from the German occupation. Inside, there was scrawled on the wall, "6 juin 44, merci" - "6th June, 1944, thank you". Simple, but telling.

Germn Bunker north of Cancale (Rundle Cook photographer)

While I was drawing, an elderly, distinguished-looking French lady came up to talk to me. After a long and delightful conversation (despite my watching the light disappear from what I drawing with dismay!!), her husband joined us. He told me of his work with the SAS for the British, remaining in France after 1940, because the British deemed him of more help in France than outside. Both Churchill and General De Gaulle decorated him for his valour after the war. Yet, as I stood up to bid him and his charming wife goodbye, it was he, the wartime hero, who thanked me formally and in most moving terms, for what the British - and Americans - did to save France.

Does "a biological sense of place" help in creating art?

Yesterday, I alluded to the question that I kept thinking about when I was working as Artist in Residence in Dinan, Brittany, through Les Amis de la Grande Vigne: does it help an artist to know well the area when he or she is painting, either en plein air, or creating work that is connected to a sense of place?

I think that a sense of comfort and familiarity frees up the artist to concentrate more on the actual art. It is really almost the same as "terroir", the biological sense of place that wine-growers talk of when they refer to specific geographical areas dictating certain characteristics in the wine produced from those regions. If you intrinsically know the place where you are working as an artist, you know, almost intuitively, the possible plays of light on the scene, the patterns, the rhythms of tides or seasons, the soils, the type of plants that grown there, etc. Because you already have this knowledge deep inside you, you can factor things in more easily as you are working. Understanding how the area "functions" means that you are not struggling so much to convey its character when you are drawing or painting.

Claude Monet is perhaps one of the most famous artists who used his sense of place, or "terroir", to allow him to produce extraordinary art. Starting with his famous series of 25 paintings of Haystacks, for instance, in 1890, Monet got to know those stacks of hay in all their times of day and weather.

Haystacks - Snow Effect, 1891, Claude Monet (Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum)

His interest in producing series of paintings continued almost unabated until the end of his life in 1926. He explored the different aspects of Poplars along the river banks in all weather and times of day. Rouen Cathedral was another series which showed his fascination with this mighty structure in its amazing diversities of light. Perhaps the most celebrated, in terms of his sense and knowledge of place, is his huge body of work , "Les Nympheas", painted at his home, Giverny, based on the waterlilies growing in the pond he created. There are 250 canvases in the series, many showing his eyesight problems with cataracts. Nonetheless, his knowledge of Giverny was almost visceral, since he had virtually created the place. This familiarity allowed him to paint masterpieces that have captivated the world ever since.

Monet's example makes a very good case for an artist to get to know an area as thoroughly as possible when creating art. Maybe "terroir" is as desirable for artists as it is for wine-growers!

La Bretagne, terre fertile pour les peintres

Lors d'un séjour récent en Bretagne, grâce aux Amis de la Grande Vigne, j'ai eu l'occasion de vérifier de nouveau l'attrait extraordinaire de ce pays breton pour les artistes. Cette Association fait sélection d'artistes pour les faciliter pendant un mois un Atelier d'artiste situé au port de Dinan (www.musees@dinan.fr).

Pendant mon séjour, je me suis retrouvée éblouie par les beautés naturelles si diverses de la campagne, de la mer et de la vallée de la Rivière Rance. Les villages et villes offrent également une richesse d'images à peindre ou à dessiner. Néanmoins, il m'a fallu un certain temps pour m'accoutumer, pour trouver "mon oeil" artistique. Même le climat demande une adaptation pour l'aquarelle car l'humidité et les changements très brusques de temps offrent des défis lorsque l'on travaille en plein air. J'ai bientôt compris pourquoi les peintres comme Henri Rivière et Mathurin Méheut ont utilisé la gouache pour leurs études en Bretagne: la gouache sèche bien plus vite que l'aquarelle.

La Baie de Radegonde, aquarelle, Jeannine Cook artiste

Cette expérience merveilleuse de travailler, en tant qu'artiste, en Bretagne m'a fait réfléchir de nouveau à la question posée par Mme. Marthe R. Severens dans son livre, Une Artiste, un Lieu et une Époque, sur l'artiste de la Caroline du Sud, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. Est-ce que la stimulation de visiter et de connaître d'autres paysages inconnus aide beaucoup l'artiste dans sa quête de travailler bien? Ou est-ce que ce dépaysement empêche l'artiste de créer une oeuvre approfondie jusqu'à ce que une connaissance plus ample du lieu mène à des possibilités de peindre (or dessiner) quelque chose qui ne soit simplement qu'un "joli tableau"?

En fait, je trouve, personnellement, que plus je connais un endroit, plus il m'est facile de me retrouver libérée et ainsi prête à faire une interprétation personnelle artistique du paysage. Raison de plus, alors, pour me retrouver sous peu en Bretagne!