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Jour de Tempête à Nice — Hommage à Matisse & pour ma Mère c.2m x 3m; huile sur toile suspendue; 2010 collection Musée internationale d'Art naïf Anatole Jakowski, Nice contents > à-propos > Installation at the Palais Masséna, April 2025 > Turkish Dellight: The Oriental Inspiration > Four Video Chapters on the Story of the Painting > Other Works on Nice & the Sea
The painting was done as part of my residency at the Musée d'Art naïf in the summer of 2010, and depicts one of those days in which a violent storm rocks Nice during a span that started nonetheless with a welcoming sunrise and closes with a deep, calm sunset. I first experienced such a day with my parents in 1972; my Mother's favourite landscape was the Tempête à Nice by Matisse, in the museum here, and I have tucked his little struggling pedestrian into my picture for that reason.
Installation — Palais Masséna
footage: Sarah Vermeersch edit: JB music: scherzo-presto from "A First String Quartet" [Op.87] by JB
Alla Turca — the Oriental Inspiration
An extraordinary frisson came when I saw the room my picture occupies at the Palais Masséna: you enter and there it is, right before you through the doorway, also well visible, as I like it to be, from a distance. Fine. But there on the wall to the left I found a picture I had not expected. At about the same size the curator has placed a reproduction of a double-page spread from a diary showing the artist's idea of the situation of the French forces resisting the Turks in around 1545. Kept in the Topkapi Library in Istanbul, the scene depicted is of the siege of Nice as envisaged by a naval officer in the Ottoman navy, the work of one Matrakci Nasuh.
Two things are at play: 1] that both pictures have an ancestry in old Chinese art, or certainly 'oriental' art of some unFlorentine sort in which... 2] ...plain observational visual gestures are dancing alongside conceptual perspectives, giving the sort of participatory image we might have in mind when explaining a topographical setting to someone wishing to get a grasp of things, indeed of a story — the Turk in an age that had not drifted across in a Montgolfier baloon, nor summoned up GoogleEarth as this Scot hates to do... Four Chapters in the Creation of the Picture at the Musée d'Art naïf in Nice, 2010 first sketches now for the trees... in the gusts of wind! Other Work on Nice and her Sea
My pictures of Nice and the Corniches are central to the work I call "RoadMovies", that's to say 'paysages' thought of as 'voyages'... car-trips complete sometimes with the steering wheel and rear-view mirror, even the dashboard...
— but even without the driver's view in view, the pictures seek to give life to that vivid sensation of driving a road, for instance the drop down from Aspremont, via the Piol, to the Baie des Anges, or the way Villefranche addresses the sea, or as we bundle along the Moyenne Corniche past Monte Carlo...
with the most ambitious composition, "The Four Ages of Man":
— not forgetting the Moggy's eye view...
— nor forgetting a never realised project for a sculpture of the Promenade des Anglais using goods' palettes...
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