Led by a husband-and-wife team formed of an architect and an artist, this workshop invites you to focus your gaze, zoom in on the essentials and identify the contrasts that speak to you in Pirosmani’s painting. After spending some time analysing Pirosmani’s works, you will discover, like how to translate your ideas into a play of volumes and colours. The very essence of what touches you in Pirosmani’s paintings will be converted into three dimensions.

A graduate of the Grenoble School of Architecture, Mathieu Tetrel combines art, architecture and design in his work. He feels a close affinity with Tadao Andō’s work in its pared-down spirit.

 Anastassia Tetrel, née Chugunova, is a visual artist who graduated from the Moscow State Academic Institute of Fine Arts and went on to study at the École supérieure d’art in Grenoble and the École supérieure d’art et design in Amiens. She will accompany you in reflecting upon and looking closely at Pirosmani’s paintings, which she has known since childhood, and will help you to implement your creative project.

Peculiar Insects

This workshop offers a hands-on introduction to engraving. We shall start by looking at different engraving techniques, after which – taking your inspiration from an etching by James Ensor – you will create a diptych composed of your own portrait and that of your child, each of you transformed into a fantastical hybrid creature.

Starting from a drawing, a camera or your imagination, you will create a portrait or self-portrait drawing, which you will then engrave using a drypoint onto a sheet of Plexiglas. Finally, you will ink and print your finished engraving.

A young French artist and printmaker, Annabel S. Chatterjee’s career has taken an unusual route. She has spent ten years in India, observing, drawing and materialising a complex, chaotic and enigmatic world. Struck by the disorder and crush of the megalopolises, she expresses in her work not only these “states of systemic disarray” — urban, environmental and human degradation — but also an interior tumult, which she visualises via landscapes in perpetual transformation, with their foaming folds and formal indecision. Their interpretation is accompanied by ambiguity, which is undoubtedly the mark of the work of an authentic artist. A graduate of the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, since 2011 she has shown her works in numerous galleries, chiefly in India. She returned to France in 2017 and today works in the “city of artists” created in the former Levat convent in Marseille, run by the Juxtapoz association.

Image : 
Annabel Chatterjee
Rock, water and ice, 2017
Drypoint on Fabriano paper,
Artist’s proof, 56 × 76 cm

SATURDAY 15 DECEMBER, WITH MAUDE GRÜBEL

Workshop offered in conjunction with Fotokino as part of the Laterna Magica festival.

In this workshop we shall be making photo transfers by means of the gesso method. Starting from pictures of nature and animals taken from books and magazines, we will use this technique – which lies between photography and painting – to transfer images onto paper and create collages. Participants can devise and design their own vision of animals in nature.

Franco-German photographer Maude Grübel has lived and worked in Marseille since 2006. Her artistic investigations focus on the construction of our personal and collective memory in relation to our intimate and social trajectories. In her artistic practice, she employs different photographic processes, drawing and the appropriation of archives, and incorporates extracts from her notebooks.  A graduate of the Munich academy of photography in 2004, her works have been exhibited in France, Germany and Algeria. In 2015 she published her first book, Jardin d’essai, with Filigranes Éditions.

Crédits : © Maude Grübel

Taking as your starting point Entrance to a Quarry by Vincent van Gogh and a contemporary work of your choice, you will explore a very ancient painting technique: tempera with animal-skin glue.

Painting and landscape will be at the centre of this collaboration between parents and children. Rather like the game of “Consequences” (in which players write down a phrase, fold down the paper to hide what they have written, and pass it on to the next player), each participant in turn will carry on painting where the other person left off, in order to reveal an outpouring of shapes and colours.

Photo : Pixabay, CC0

Take time to look at the artworks, with no explanations. A time of silence. Just observing. And then have fun, sometimes using sound and music, dreaming up a story around these works. I had a dream… it starts like that. Taking the work you have chosen as your starting point, let your own “interpretation” loose and tell its tale. A sort of fantasy in 3D. The dreams of grown-ups and of children. Dare to speak, gently and calmly. While having fun, too. And head off back to the artworks and their presentation. A sort of entertaining passageway between what we dream about and through the artworks, and what hides behind their artists’ dreams.

Based in Arles since 2009, the L’Isba collective shares its love of words, music-making, speech and theatre with the public. Its work draws upon texts, but equally upon human experiences, memories and differences. This desire to restore space to the spoken word and to share it translates into numerous workshops held both at the local level and in conjunction with Arles’ cultural institutions. Founders Catherine Krajewski, actress and drama teacher, François De Bortoli, sound composer and technical director, and Jean-François Veran, author/composer/performer, were soon joined by other “inventors”, who reinforce and enlarge the collective over the course of its productions, opening it ever wider to sounds and voices from outside.

Photo: Andrea Büttner, Coins, 2017, woodcut 124 x 173 cm.

In this workshop we shall be experimenting with the technique of monotype (used by Degas and Klee, in particular) in various ways. Monotype is a printing process without engraving which produces just one print. It involves inking a sheet of Plexiglas using a roller. To create your design, you can either draw on top of the inked plate using different tools, or use the inked roller to create a print of a plant, folded papier shapes, stencils etc.

Light, composition and space will be our primary points of focus. The papers will be chosen for their quality, transparency (Japanese paper) and softness (rag paper).

Photo : Pixabay, CC0

How are santons created, modelled, sculpted, fired and painted? We invite you to discover their secrets while leaving plenty of room for your own imagination. You will create your own figurines in a contemporary scene, inspired by Van Gogh and the artists of the exhibition « La Vie simple – Simplement la vie / Songs of Alienation.

Photo : Pixabay, CC0

Take one parent, one child and a family recipe and you have the ingredients of this drawing workshop, which turns a spoonful of love and memory, its simplicity and its recall, into words and pictures. To transmit, share and savour together!

Visual artist Hélène Bergaz-Mouren is passionate about archives, the printed document, memory, its recovery and its transmission. Fanny Guiol, architect, ceramicist and masseuse, offers experiences through the modelling of space, clay and bodies. A return to simplicity and well-being.

Picture: Fanny Guiol and Hélène Bergaz

A former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Mulhouse, Christine Millerin lives and works in Arles, where she presents her textile collections in a studio-boutique.

At the end of the course, we will record our compositions. These will be turned into a CD in a professional studio and a copy sent to each participant. 

Thézame Barrême is a French artist, singer-songwriter, performer and writer. She teaches songwriting at the music and drama academy Cours Florent Musique and has written texts for numerous artists. She also designs and leads writing workshops.