If you love trees…

On a recent visit to the town of Caen, which is quite close to us, I went to see an exhibition in the Musée des Beaux Arts. The museum organises residencies, and the artists then curate a show with the works they created during the residency.

The artist in question, the engraver Caroline Bouyer, had made portraits of the trees in the park of the Chateau de Caen, which is where the museum is situated. The trees had been severely tested by the high temperatures and aridity of this summer, and her purpose was to highlight the contrast between their strength and their fragility.

These small engravings were actually made outdoors, and the trees sketched from life directly onto the plate. The paper also sometimes revealed tears.

Bouyer also made some large charcoal drawings, from which she would later draw inspiration in the studio.

I love the feeling of the wind in the trees in the one below. These were just pinned to the wall.

She also showed some pretty cool sketchbooks.

And a large collage of many small, delicately detailed drawings.

See some of the components below:

Bouyer also made some ‘compositions’, as she calls them, by the process of layering several pre-engraved plates to create a new image. Here creativity lies in the act of printing, not the engraving itself. She used materials gathered locally, like onion skins, gallnuts etc. to make her paper dyes.

Born in 1972, Caroline Bouyer lives and works in the Paris region. Her preferred artistic medium has, from an early age, been the carving of designs onto metal plates. Both an artist and an educator, she teaches printmaking at the École Estienne in Paris. For her residency, she explored the city and its surroundings on the recommendations of the public, and made many sketches during her explorations. A lot of these were made into a sort of map, which sadly was too big to photograph.

I was very inspired by this show, since I also have a partiality for drawing and painting trees.