Saturday 7th March 2015

 

Expo Joie de Vivre – Come and play with us!

 

What is Art? This is a question that has stimulated debate and even anger for centuries, but has not deterred ‘artists’ from continuing to create and explore in whatever ways they can.

The great artists who visited or lived in Ceret included the most passionate – Chaim Soutine, whose trees and houses are so animated they almost fly off the canvas, Braque and Juan Gris, whose Cubist work involved careful calculation, and Picasso,  whose greatest gift to us was to show us how to express ourselves freely and to use anything in our environments, from an old car part to a dinner plate, to have FUN!

 

And it’s for fun that the ‘poussins’ de  La Poule Bottée (Chick-in-Boots) aged 10 – 15, come every Saturday morning to ‘Jouer a l’Art’ with me. We play with whatever materials we have or can find to use, but we also do careful drawings to learn how to look carefully again and again – maybe with magnifying glasses – to understand and represent the objects of our gaze. At the other end of the spectrum the children do large cooperative abstract paintings and collages – as many as eight children working together to produce some marvellously colourful and imaginative work. The more timid lose their inhibitions, the more experienced  their need for individual approval, as they create something they can all be proud of.

I now run whole days of ‘Jouer a l’Art’ for adults’. They have been a great success: on viewing a painting executed by six adults, the children asked “Jane, how did you get the grown-ups to do THAT?!”

Expo Joie de Vivre 2 takes place at Jane Henriques’ studio, La Poule Bottée, on Saturday 7th March, 9.30 -1300 h, with a second opportunity to see the work (but not all the children) on  Sat 14th March 9.30 -13.00h.

Atelier la Poule Bottée, where you can also see a range of Jane’s own work every Saturday, is directly behind the Monument Maillol at the top of Place de la Liberté. See our FB page, Atelier La Poule Bottée.

Please pop in and play for a while with us on Sat 7th March and give the children and their creations the attention they deserve!

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