Seyssel-sur-Rhône 15 July 1997

Fourteen watercolour artists descended on this little town in the Upper Rhône valley for a 3-day festival of painting culminating on 'Le Quatorze' (14th July) - the French National Holiday in this year falling conveniently on a Monday. Their task was to complete 2 paintings a day of Seyssel and its immediate surroundings for exhibition (and purchase) over the holiday weekend. There any similarity between the painters ended.
Six came from Geneva, all linked in some way with the Association of Painters of Carouge; three were French; there were three Britons and two American ladies who had travelled all the way from Boston. There-were an equal number of men and women artists in the group. Experience varied widely, from 'Sunday painters' to full-time professionals (though this did not seem to affect sales). Several of the women artists had gone back to painting after marriage and had to fit it in to a busy schedule. Others of the group were involved in teaching art. Only two, Eric Durussel of Switzerland and Paul Talbot- Greaves from England, relied entirely on their paintings for their livelihood. Not surprisingly they adapted readily to the situation and had no difficulty in turning in two competent works a day. Those with some acquaintance with the area, also had an advantage. The others had to carry out their reconnaissance, pick their subjects and whip off two paintings all in the space of 6 hours (with a 2-hour break for lunch initially). Seyssel though of ancient foundation is not an obviously picturesque town. Its main feature is of course the Rhône, fast-flowing and broad, dividing the town in two so that half lies in the Department of l'Ain and half in Haute Savoie. There are two bridges, the modern one in itself much resembling a piece of modern sculpture. A nice old church stands on either side of the river, one near the old bridge with a steeple and nearby on the riverbank stands a colonnaded market place forming a coherent group of buildings. Narrow streets wind up the slope on either bank with several curious corners and views. The town is closed in with fields of maize, vineyards and meadowland up to the woods and ridges of Colombier on one side and the crags of the Gorges de Fier on the other.

Several participants tackled a broad sweep of landscape on the first day and ran hopelessly out of time, bogged down with detail. 'I needed 3 days for my subject not 3 hours..' bemoaned Liisa Wuoti from Boston. First day successes were strictly limited pieces catching a single shuttered window, a street corner with geraniums, a clearing in a wood with wild poppies in the foreground. The group were surprisingly reticent in their choice of the most hackneyed subjects: church, river and bridges. Geoffrey May, an Englishman, settled in Geneva, bypassed the pitfalls of a patterned landscape by pushing his treatment towards the abstract with a patchwork of bright squares of totally unrealistic colours - purple, crimson, electric green, royal blue. Paul Talbot Greaves tackled the riverside scene of bridge, church and river as a luminous night-piece. The leader of the Geneva aquarellists, Jacques Tornare, presented several well-finished paintings of the main town in what one would have called the full English watercolour tradition of Cotman and Crome. Is that a transplant or a remarkably similar native tradition? These works would have been perfectly at home in a mid-nineteenth-century show in, say, Norwich - a centre for so many English water-colourists. Undoubtedly the painters new to on-site work in the open benefited most from Les Journées de Painture du Seyssel. They had to adapt to picking an appropriate subject, painting it on the spot without benefit of studio and to a tight time- table in accomplishing the piece. Some of them had to contend with crowds of onlookers. Discipline can often be a springboard as well as a restriction - and so it proved for the incomers of this group. There were no prizes, only sales. But there was no concealing the element of competition. For some participants this was paralysing rather than stimulating at any rate to start with. "But we have not come half-way round the world to humiliate ourselves," asserted the ladies from the New World.

'Les Journées de Peinture' was inaugurated in 1996, the brainchild of Jacques Vion, proprietor of Seyssel's principal hotel, the Hotel du Rhône situated on the west bank. It was a simple formula: 12 to 14 artists (chosen by personal recommendation) were invited to spend 3 days at the hotel while they made 6 or so paintings of their surroundings for exhibition on Bastille Day along the promenade outside the hotel when people poured into Seyssel for the festivities. The proceeds were split 50:50 between the artists and the sponsoring society; board and lodging were free - board at the Hotel du Rhône in particular being outstanding. Asked what she felt at the end of the third day one of the year's newcomers, Mary Jane Orley from Divonne replied without hesitation - 'Very relieved that it's all over!' Clearly this was no sunshine holiday. Yet despite the reservations and various suggestions for improvements in the detailed planning, there was a unanimous view that 'I wouldn't have missed it for the -world' and everyone agreed that they had learnt a great deal and mostly from each other. Participants were busy translating 'Les Journées de Peinture' into the terms of their own countries. There are indeed hopes of extending the idea to other lands, other places..
Vive Les Journées de Peinture!


Angela Croome, together with Bob Quinlan (an art loving American now retired to a house near Seyssel) has been involved with 'Les Journées de Peinture' since its inception in 1996. She is a very active Executive Trustee of the Edna Lumb Artistic Trust (ELAT) which finances and administers the annual Edna Lumb Travel Prize for students of Art at Leeds Metropolitan University, the successor of the famous Leeds College of Art where Edna Lumb trained.

To learn more about Edna Lumb, her work and, her long association with Saddleworth - where there is a major collection of her paintings including studies of local mills - may be found on the website:- www.lumbscape.org.uk.