Large Scale French Graffiti
How do you put a painting on a Parisian rooftop? Start with les drones.
French graffiti artists Ella and Pitr have painted Europe's largest work of street art on a roof of a Paris convention centre. Covering 2.5 hectares, the image of an old woman intersected by the ring road around the French capital can be fully viewed only from the sky.
Only from high above can one see how it adds up to an image of an old woman, looking down at the traffic on the Périphérique, the busy ring road that surrounds the French capital. The duo stated that “Her eyes are half closed because she’s very bored by all the fast stuff around her…We wanted to find something with a lot of contrast with the geographic site,” which is full of traffic both by car and foot.
Photo: Objectif Aéro/Ludovic Delage
The duo gained access to the roof through an arrangement between city officials and Art en Ville, a group promoting urban art in public places. This isn’t the first time the duo has created projects like this. Ella + Pitr have created other large-scale works in France, Portugal, Chile, Canada and elsewhere since they met in the French city of Saint-Etienne in 2007.
The new work covers a surface equivalent to four football fields. It breaks the artists’ own record, set with a mural in Norway in 2015. Amazingly they completed the mural over eight days in June using acrylic paints diluted and loaded into spray cans.
The duo brilliantly used drones to create it while referring to aerial photos of the roof. Because of it’s location, even by standing on an adjacent rooftop, the full image is not visible and the Olivier Landes, the curator and founder of Art en Ville stated that “We’re counting on the Internet and the media to spread the aerial image, which will be viewed virtually, on a screen, like all works of urban art.”
The artwork itself will exist until 2022, when the hall is to be demolished as part of a renovation project to prepare the complex for the 2024 Olympic Games.
We hope you enjoyed learning about Large Scale French Graffiti! What are your thoughts on this new form of urban art? Does it add character to the city even though it can only be viewed online? Join the conversation below!
French Art En Plein Air
An investigation of the famous French art form.
As the colors of summer start drifting into the warm breeze of fall, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate some French Art En Plein Air. For all you art buffs out there, you will enjoy this journey through the impactful things that French artists did to change the course of art history forever. I hope this inspires you and, who knows, maybe we'll catch you in Central Park with your French Box Easel this fall?
En Plein Air is a French expression and term used in Art meaning 'in the open air.' This phrase became popular in the mid-19th century when art schools, such as the Barbizon School, stressed the importance of their oil painters to head outdoors (in natural light) to recreate the nature around them in their paintings. This also became a popular method of painting with the introduction of paint tubes in the 1840's. In that time, artists were required to hand make their oil paints by mixing dry pigments with linseed oil. All of that changed when paint tubes were invented (which is how we buy oil paints in art stores today). These tubes made life easier for artists to travel with their art supplies during en plein air projects and sparked another invention known as the French Box Easel. These boxes could be considered the 'briefcase' for most artists and contained a simple pair of wooden legs and an easel to prop up a canvas to paint on. To this day, a visit to France will likely consist of a gorgeous view and a few artists on the side streets with their wooden box easels painting away.
Try practicing your French vocabulary by listening to the words below and saying them out loud:
En Plein Air - In the open air
Une Toile - Canvas
Peinture à l'huile - Oil Paint
Un Chevalet - Easel
Peindre - To paint
Let's continue to dive deeper and paint a picture of the artists that made French En Plein Air what we know it to be today. Highly celebrated painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, & Pierre-Auguste Renoir were among the leaders who fashioned en plain air, making it famous through their independent exhibitions of 'Impressionist' work. Together they created the art movement Impressionism & caused quite a stir in the art community of the time. Working en plein air was outlandish due to the fact that landscapes & portraits were usually painted in a studio. However, they took art further by portraying the transient sunlight depicted through short, visible brush strokes - evoking the feeling of a passing of time. To give you a better idea, take a peak at some of their work below:
Arm of the Seine near Vetheuil - Claude Monet (Image: www.wikiart.org)
Impression Sunrise - Claude Monet (Image: www.wikiart.org)
Road at Eragny, Winter - Camille Pissarro (Image: www.wikiart.org)
Windmill at Knokke, Belgium - Camille Pissarr0 (Image:www.wikiart.org)
Alphonsine Fournasie on the Isle of Chatou - Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Image: www.wikiart.org)
Beaulieu - Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Image: www.wikiart.org)
Today, we celebrate the work of these great artists in numerous art museums around the world. French Art Plein Air & Impressionism are of the most prolific moments in art history and from it, came great masterpieces, oil paint tubes, and French Box Easels. Can you remember the last time you saw some great Impressionist work? Don't forget to tell us all about it the comments section below (all comments en Français get bonus points)!
Looking to learn more French language and culture? Visit our website for our latest Group Class schedule, Private Lessons, and other services - www.jplinguistics.com.