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Des oiseaux et des livres à la galerie La Grange

Photo: Marlène Rézenne
Galerie La Grange, Romainmôtier

 

(Translated from French by JLB)

Last spring, Jane Le Besque shared the gallery’s picture rails with half a dozen artists. She will be returning alone until the end of September.   A waking dream. No visitor had been insensitive to the dreamlike world of the English artist who crossed the Channel a dozen years ago to settle in neighbouring France. On a black background, brightly coloured flowers were blooming. No doubt similar to those met by Alice in her wonderful country.

Birds are the messengers of her colourful pictorial language. Even as a child, she used to gather them, wounded, in the palm of her hand to breathe a second life into them. In her paintings, there are hens from her native Sussex, a goose hesitating between two vermeille apples, another gallinaceous one with yellow legs and pheasants skilfully illuminated by the artist. And even a beet bird! They evolve in a knot of thin, straight trees.

On a canvas, a woman’s face and bust, immaculately white. The beak of a bird, variegated with bright colours, touches the woman’s closed mouth, in a dialogue without words. On another canvas, trees in the shape of a club, with tentacles that seem to sow hearts in a faded sky. On a magpie horse whose head is out of frame, a young girl talks to a yellow duck resting on the horse’s rump.

An immersion in nature:

In communion with nature, Jane Le Besque is in the vegetable garden: “I am on the ground with the animals but my head is in the vegetation.” She puts down on paper what she has seen but with a poetic touch. The basis of her paintings is watercolour to which she mixes collages, oil, charcoal or chalk.

Artist’s books:

Currently, Jane is working on a book with the evocative name “Edens”, but revisited by her imagination. A poet, Jean Maison, ‘assures her collaboration. The painter has made a name for herself in cookery books that would make you want to buy a big hat. At the gallery, she exhibits two “accordion books”, where she lets her brushes and her imagination run wild. A little bookish delight for lovers of an art that one would readily describe as lyrical!

In addition, she has immortalised some of her birds on large white plates.

Jane Le Besque