Exploring Art

Cécile Plaa

Cécile’s art can be found on Instagram via @cile_mcp_art. The South Yarra art collective mentioned refers to the Chapel Street Collective, and can be located here: https://chapelstcollective.com.

Maybe you know me, maybe not. I’m Cécile, residential Arts tutor for two years at St Hilda’s college. I’m the short French woman.

I could write about the French language, or European politics and history, but I risk being boring. Academic education is a pillar of our community, but I would like to share with you some thoughts about fine art which is one of my passions and occupations.

The lockdown was an opportunity for me to emotionally reinvest in my passion for oil painting. There are many arts and there are as many artistic expressions as there are artists. Everyone explores works in their own way while repeating gestures and techniques passed down from generation to generation. Many artists are inventing new techniques (even more so today with digital art), but it is always beautiful to see that they draw inspiration from their peers. No matter what scale, I like to believe that artists are explorers: they travel and discover.

There are many “mediums” in painting: watercolour, gouache, resin, acrylic and oil. For me, oil painting smells of childhood: I started painting this medium at a young age in a fine arts class. As a hyperactive kid, this was the only thing that kept me focused, sometimes for hours. At the age of 10, I did a painting course during the school holidays (two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon). Tired, I sat down on my palette. I’ll let you imagine my parents’ faces when I came home in the evening ... Oil painting is the only medium that I have really worked with. It requires a certain rigour and routine that I appreciate. It is also one of the oldest surviving mediums. Oil painting gradually replaced tempura (egg white paint) during the Renaissance in Italy, then in Flanders and throughout Europe.

From the Renaissance to the 19th century, artists, organized in workshops with apprentices, prepared oil paint from natural pigments (mainly plants or minerals) by mixing them with oil (linseed oil most of the time). Pigments were expensive and required a lot of preparatory work. The oil painting took time because it dries slowly, and you work by layers. Fortunately, in the 19th century with industrialisation and modernisation, important inventions were made: tube painting was invented and easels became portable (which allowed the Impressionist movement to paint outdoors, for example). These inventions also gradually allowed oil painting to become more democratic. And thanks to all this, more and more artists (including many women) can paint today.

I put ‘women’ in parentheses because unfortunately they are still under-represented in the world of the arts. In terms of data, I will only cite an equivocal report from the French Ministry of Culture: six out of ten students at the Beaux-Arts are women while one in ten awarded artists is a woman.

Personally, painting calms me down and gives me joy. I love the material, the texture of oil painting. I prepare my canvases with terra Siena pigments; when it’s dry I take out my brushes and paint. Most often I paint by mixing images, photos, and memories, or I use objects for still life paintings. I paint in all modesty and do not paint anything revolutionary. On the contrary, my style is quite ‘early twentieth century’. I have always loved Expressionists and would like to paint in a more modern way sometimes, but I continue to paint like when I was 14 years old. The gesture is stronger than the mind.

Finally, I have this impression; there is often a disparity between the object I paint and its representation, because I place more importance on the experience of the touch of the brush than on the desire to accurately represent reality. I prefer to paint with my heart rather than with my eyes.

Recently, I had the chance and the opportunity to join a collective in South Yarra. Perhaps this will be the occasion to make interesting new experiences and encounters.

A French idiom says that we can’t please everyone “on ne peut pas plaire à tout le monde” so if you like my artworks don’t hesitate to talk about it with me or to just have a look on my Instagram. If you do not, I am sure there are several talented artists in this College whom you can encourage.