French artist visits Chch to paint gardens

Press, 13 December 1989, Page 24

French artist visits Chch to paint gardens

A French artist, Jane Pecheur, is spending the summer in Christchurch painting the ' city’s gardens. She has a room at the Botanic Gardens, where she -has access to the greenhouses and botanical specimens. “Christchurch Gardens,” an exhibition of her work, is on show at Ritchies Fine Arts until December 22. Pecheur spent most of her childhood in the Champagne region, but studied art in Paris at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Nationale des Arts Appliques. This wide-ranging training has enabled her to work with a wide variety of materials, from drawings, oils and watercolours to murals in cafes and decorations in department stores, and from

painting on furniture and fabrics to illustrating books and designing greeting cards. Between 1950 and 1970, she decorated more than. 100 cafes and other buildings. Last year, the Carnavalet Museum in Paris acquired a collection of the original designs for the murals, in order to preserve this ephemeral art.

Nevertheless, Pecheur regards her personal work as pivotal. She blends realism and free interpretation in landscapes, flowers and studies of the human body.

“I cannot keep very long from nature,” she says. "I need its generous company. I need its plants and small creatures as well as its changing light and moods.”