What Are the Interior and Exterior Scences in Art

"New York Nights Two," Fanch Ledan

François "Fanch" Ledan is an exceptional painter and printmaker. In following essay—taken from the book "Fanch: The Graphic Piece of work"—art scholar Eleanor Hight, Ph.D. provides an excellent history of Fanch'due south career and talks virtually the origins of the artist's iconic "interiorscapes."

A recent original impress by Fanch Ledan offers a window onto this artist'south world, a graceful synthesis of observed fact, artistic homage, and reverie. In "Interior with Buddha," 2001, a serigraph from a painting that was washed the previous year, we expect downward on an elegant room. Though no one is present except for us, the viewers, nosotros can piece together the story of a life. Classical music played on a harp, reading while taking tea, appreciating antiques, and the Castilian masters of modern art—Picasso and Miró.

All is ordered by an underlying geometry—the foursquare columns, the vertical strings of the harp, the pink and rose stripes of the upholstery. The colors, besides, contribute to a sense of harmony and quiet. Intense hues of orange, yellow, and blue-green in the piece of furniture and artwork are modulated past the softer complementaries of pinks and blues. While these details tell of a cultivated life in a k interior, the epitome shows that the creative person is as concerned with other worlds.

"Above Santorini" (2008), Fanch Ledan

Taking a cue from the glasses left on a chair, we change our field of vision from well-nigh to far, either literally out the window to the sparkling cityscape at night or, as implied past the pink quartz Buddha elevated on its pedestal, spiritually to the sky above. A perfect earth of comfort and fine art is juxtaposed with the infinite world of dreaming.

The basic elements of this work—the high vantage point, the absent only unsaid presence of participants, the society enhanced past colour, the afar view—characterize most of Fanch'southward mature work, both his paintings and his graphic works. The tremendous entreatment of his art comes from the delicate residuum, but underlying tension, between what is real and what is possible.

His cheeriness, often exuberance, is balanced past both worldly knowledge and personal introspection. Fanch chooses from his meticulously rendered paintings, a relatively minor yearly output of effectually 25-30 works, those images he will make into original prints. From the beginning of his career, he saw his greatest accomplishment to be the publishing his fine art and then that information technology might be more than broadly known. Over the last iii decades, he has created a staggering number of limited editions…

The art created by François Ledan, known today primarily by his nickname Fanch, is inextricably tied to the events of his life. His identity as a Breton, his years studying, living, and working in the United States and France, his wanderlust—all have shaped his world view and thus his art. A closer look at the path he has traveled offers another window onto the world he creates through his paintings and his graphic fine art.

Fanch Ledan and Park West Gallery Founder and CEO Albert Scaglione

Built-in in 1949 in Pontivy, Brittany, in northwestern France, Fanch was the youngest child of a doctor (his father) and a dentist (his female parent). He was educated in local schools before furthering his undergraduate and graduate school studies in Paris. Though talented in mathematics and science, living in Paris drew his attention to the charms of the city and its famed art scene.

Past the time he earned his three available'south degrees in mathematics, science, and philosophy at the precocious age of 19, he had started to paint his start small paintings—street scenes of Paris. He had as well commenced his life of constant travel with an excursion to Greece, Republic of hungary, and Yugoslavia. At commencement, Fanch followed the professional life chosen past his parents and siblings (his brother is an engineer and his sister an orthopedist).

He studied concern in Rennes, Brittany, and in Paris, where he obtained a master's caste from the École Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales Appliqués in 1972. During this time in Paris, he also met students at the École des Beaux-Arts and visited the major museums and galleries.

Yet Fanch longed to travel to the United states and, luckily, his parents consented on the condition that he continue his studies. Thus, in 1972, he entered the Master of Business Administration programme at Sacramento Country University, where he obtained his degree the following year.

"Interior with Picasso II" (2016), Fanch Ledan

The twelvemonth 1973 was important, however, for another reason. Fanch decided to show some of his paintings to McInnes Bromfield, managing director of the Pantechnicon Gallery in San Francisco and, to his surprise, he offered Fanch his first exhibition at the gallery. The next year, this was followed past some other testify at the Pantechnicon Gallery, every bit well every bit exhibitions in Los Angeles, Laguna Embankment, New York, and Milan. Suddenly, Fanch realized he could brand his living by doing what he loved virtually and what had only been an avocation upwardly to this indicate—creating art.

In 1974, Fanch needed to return to France to fulfill his obligation for military service, simply what could have been an unwelcome hiatus in a burgeoning career became instead, as it has oftentimes seemed in his serendipitous life, a milestone. Fortunate to obtain a military administrative postal service at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Paris, Fanch dedicated his time afterwards work to his fine art, turning in one case again to Parisian street scenes.

Fanch'southward flat, which doubled as his studio, was located on Rue Jolivet in Montparnasse over a lithography store. Fanch became a regular visitor at Atelier Noël, where he learned zinc plate lithography. In 1975, he also had an exhibition at the atelier of his first forays into printmaking there, along with a selection of his paintings.

Today, Fanch recalls how thrilled he was at the time to "be published," which he saw and then, as now, to be the ultimate accomplishment for an artist. This ii-year sojourn in Paris also included the publication of his first edition of lithographs by Éditions Tallandier. Thus, at the commencement of his career, a prominent Parisian publisher admired his art enough to have a fiscal risk by investing in the product of his original prints.

"New York Moonscape II" (2016), Fanch Ledan

Later on he completed his military service in French republic, Fanch decided to return in 1975 to San Francisco, the site of his first artistic success. Now a permanent resident of the United States, he purchased a firm and studio beyond the Bay in Sausolito, where he would live and work for the next sixteen years. All the same, he connected to travel back and forth betwixt California and French republic, likewise as to other areas of the globe.

By the time Fanch settled in California, he was devoted to graphic art, and he worked to hone his skills in a variety of printmaking techniques. He studied serigraphy, or fine art silk-screening, and stone lithography in both San Francisco and Paris, at starting time printing and sometimes publishing his works himself. Over the next 20 years, he would piece of work in a number of highly-esteemed printing studios in these and other cities around the globe, including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.

The paintings and lithographs from the 1970s and early on 1980s display characteristics often associated with "naive" art, and a number of his early exhibitions were held in galleries and museums that specialized in this type of fine art, such as the Centro d'Arte Naivo in Milan and the Galerie Naïfs et Primitifs in Paris. His views of Paris, a urban center which had embraced naive fine art since the early twentieth century, display the attention to infinitesimal particular, the use of brightly-colored accents, and the asymmetric and just rendered figures typical of a self-taught artist.

"Interior with Velux" (2005), Fanch Ledan

Fanch's early naive style tin can exist seen in his painting "Chez l'Artiste" (Home of the Creative person, 1979), a view of his own neighborhood in Montparnasse. In addition, Fanch's images of the streets, parks, and bridges of Paris, as well as leisure activities—skating, riding in carriages, enjoying music in the park—are reminiscent of the subjects depicted by the French Impressionists. He portrayed like subjects in this way for scenes in the United states of america, as in his painting from 1979 entitled "South Street New York" (lithograph, 1980). Paintings such as this of New York Metropolis or of the San Francisco area reconstruct lively occasions of nineteenth-century life.

In the 1980s, Fanch turned to more brightly colored paintings, and once more a connectedness to Impressionism can be found. His painting, "La Bonne Adresse" (The Adept Accost, 1986), makes a humorous reference to Claude Monet's painting "Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse" (Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, 1867). Fanch used the aforementioned bright colors for the water, flowers, sky, and French flags waving in the breeze, while, similar Monet, he as well positioned a man and a woman sitting in bentwood chairs admiring the view.

Rather than Monet's fashionable location of a resort hotel in Sainte-Adresse on the north coast of France, Fanch's "good accost" is a terrace in the upscale residential neighborhood of the Île St.-Louis in Paris. His figures enjoy a view beyond the Seine to iconic Parisian monuments, including the Eiffel Tower and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Later on, after Fanch began to paint interior scenes with masterpieces in them, he included this painting by Monet over a fireplace in "Interior with Three Masterpieces," 1999 (serigraph, 2002).

"Interior with Litchenstein" (2006), Fanch Ledan

Fanch was able to replicate the color furnishings of his paintings in his lithographs by working with highly skilled and sensitive chromists, or color technicians, in the famed impress ateliers of Paris—Desjobert, Grapholith, and Artestampe. In these studios, sophisticated color separation, split fountain, and registration techniques produced images that beautifully capture the range and subtle gradations of color, and the meticulous item found in his paintings.

"Ballooning over Gilt Gate Bridge," 1988, a lithograph based on a painting from 1987, demonstrates the high quality of his published work at the time. The view is across San Francisco Bay to Sausolito, so the location of his home/atelier. Fanch included elements that characterize many of his paintings: a local monument (the Golden Gate Bridge), a leisure-time activity (sailing), and colorful highlights (the hot air balloons and the sailboats' spinnakers).

An avid sportsman who particularly loves h2o sports, Fanch frequently used these favorite motifs in his views, whether depicting the rivers of Paris, the tropical beaches of Bali, the harbor of Sidney, Commonwealth of australia, or the Mediterranean coast in France and Italy. Fanch'due south time spent working at these Parisian ateliers, and others such as that run by Circle Gallery in New York, was of import not only for the development of his palette and his fashion, but these studios also provided a nourishing environment and opportunities to meet other graphic artists.

"Interior with Bellet" (2006), Fanch Ledan

In the early 1980s, Fanch too began to work on paintings that he refers to as "interiorscapes" or "interior visions." One of the first, "The Striped Divan," 1983 (lithograph, 1983), is a view due west across Central Park in New York City to the twin towers of the Eldorado, an art deco apartment edifice built in 1931. Undulating colorful stripes of the inviting couch and pillows pb to the view, while the indoor plants, ever present in his interiors, bring nature in to the viewer.

One of the most beautiful of these early interiors is his "Villa Rochambaud," 1985 (lithograph, "Above Cannes," 1989). The composition is a complex organization of diagonal patterns of light and varying shades of a cheerful nonetheless serene blue-green held securely into place by the symmetrically balanced wall and the rectangular panes of glass in the windows and French doors.

In the mid-1980s, Fanch began to include paintings past modern masters in his interiors, as he says "to pay tribute and humble homage," and, in the early on nineties, he began to concentrate on this theme. One of the primeval paintings in this genre, "Interior Mirobolant" (serigraph, 1986), includes a number of elements that volition appear repeatedly over the next decade and a half.

"Interior with Miro 2," Fanch Ledan

In a mod interior, works in the style of Miró, Chagall, and Picasso are displayed with tropical plants and flower arrangements, and a carpet inspired by Miró also. The serene whites of the walls offset the bright colors of the pillows, pictures, and rug. This kind of interior, however, gave mode to his more than typical expansive spaces that open to an outside view.

"Interior with Pablo," 1997 (serigraph, "Interior with Four Picassos," 1999) is one of a recent serial of paintings and serigraphs featuring an open interior with masterpieces and a view of a well-known location. In a fashion, this paradigm focuses our attending on two sacred spaces: the interior with paintings, sculpture, and music; the exterior with the architectural monuments of Paris.

"Interior with Max" (2004), Fanch Ledan

Fanch pays homage to a wide range of other mod and contemporary artists, who in subtle ways have influenced his own art. Additional artists include the Impressionists Monet, Degas, and Cezanne; the Post-impressionists Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, and Gauguin; the Surrealists Miró, Dalí, and Magritte; more than recent artists such equally Lichtenstein and Peter Max; as well as Léger and Mondrian.

As indicated past "To a higher place Cannes" and "Interior with Four Picassos," if Fanch had not chosen to be an artist or a businessman, he could certainly accept become a fine architect. His paintings and original graphics of the 1970s and 1980s constantly focused on the grapheme of specific buildings and urban settings. In one case Fanch turned to his interior views in the 1980s, he began to design ane interior space later on some other. While inspired by his commonage memories of places he had seen, these interiors leap from his imagination rather than recording specific places.

As might be expected from 1 who loves the outdoors, these are most oft open, airy spaces. There is never a sense of beingness closed in; at that place is room to move inside and easy access to the exterior through open windows, or doors to views of a city or the bounding main.

The style of his architectural spaces is distinctly mod, either with the accents of natural wood favored in Northern California or the white walls and clean lines of the International Style modernist architecture that developed in Europe afterwards the Offset World War.

More than recently, he has moved into the realm of postmodern compages, bringing back architectural features, such as moldings and pediments that had once been spurned past the modernists. Or he tin can turn to the Moorish style found throughout the Mediterranean, as in "Patio over Tiny Island," 2000 (seriolithograph, 2001). Whatever the mode, certain features appear repeatedly—loftier ceilings, doors or windows opening onto balconies and patios—all the same, no two spaces are ever the same.

"Red Window on Paris" (2015), Fanch Ledan

Today, Fanch'due south graphic art is published and distributed through Park West Gallery in Southfield, Michigan. Fanch showtime met Albert Scaglione, founder of the gallery, at Artexpo New York in 1983, and soon after Park West began to co-publish and distribute editions of his graphics. Fifteen years later on, Fanch and Scaglione entered an exclusive agreement for the publication and distribution of Fanch's original prints and paintings.

Fanch has experimented with large-scale serigraphy, seriolithography, various papers and linen, and metal reliefs. Working with Ran Bolokan and other chromists and technicians at Romi-Shaked Lavan, Park West's atelier in Israel, Fanch has been able to obtain a broader range of colors and tones and more than intricate detail than e'er before, as seen in the cityscape of "Interior with Buddha." One of Fanch's serigraphs tin can require from sixty to ninety screens to accomplish the qualities he seeks. Fanch makes additional adjustments to the proofs by working with Park West Gallery in Southfield.

Fanch's work with Park West Gallery does non hateful that he no longer travels. At present, rather than traveling in search of new venues for his art, his trips abroad are related to his own need for creative renewal and artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, it is when he returns home to Vallauris in the S of French republic that he finds the ideal setting for creating art.

Every bit seen in his serigraph "A View from the Studio," 1997, for his creative work Fanch has a room with a glorious view onto an expansive and colorful world of tranquility, beauty, and enjoyment. With his wife and sons, abiding travel, and successful career, Fanch feels truly blest, and he in turn passes on fortune'due south favor to all those who encounter his art. In the early on twenty-first century, when we wonder if humanity is advancing or falling dorsum into the night ages, Fanch's optimistic and colorful art lifts us upward and gives us joy.

"Patio sur Riviere" (2005), Fanch Ledan

To collect the art of Fanch Ledan, register for our exciting alive online auctions or contact our gallery consultants at (800) 521-9654 ext. 4 or sales@parkwestgallery.com.

Most the Author: Eleanor 1000. Hight received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1986 and is currently Assistant Professor of Fine art History at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. A specialist in twentieth-century art, her publications include the article "German language Art 1905-1925: Technique as Expression" in German Expressionist Art: Selections from the Rosi and Ludwigh Fischer Collection (Washington University Printing, 1987), and the volume "Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany" (MIT, 1995). She has as well published essays on Surrealism, contemporary fine art, and photography, and is the co-editor of "Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place" (Routledge, 2003).

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