Bastille Day, La Fête Nationale (The National Celebration), le quatorze juillet(the fourteenth of July) – in France, it’s a day of nationwide festivity, much like our Fourth of July, where fireworks canopy the sky and military parades roll down the Champs Elysée. Historically, the celebration commemorates the storming of the Bastille fortress prison on July 14, 1789, the beginning of the end of the French Revolution, and the birth of a modern nation.But for American students and educators of art and design, Bastille Day is a yearly reminder of something more: the myriad and deep cultural ties to la douce France. Urban planners, remember that the plan for our capital city was designed by a French engineer, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and reflects the concentric circles of Parisian streets. Writers, remember that the first major study of Americans, Democracy in America, was written by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville. Sculptors remember that the Statue of Liberty, one of our most treasured national symbols of home and freedom, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and given to the American people. As Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris recently captured, American artists and designers have flocked to France for artistic inspiration for ages: James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray, etc. More recently, Marc Jacobs, Erin Fetherston, Johnny Depp, and, now, legions of SCAD students.
Bastille Day, the SCAD way
This year, I fêted Bastille Day with students at SCAD Lacoste, where the esprit du quatorze juillet was palpable. To salute the occasion, several students organized an intimate concert in Maison Forte, an 11th century stone building once used to house the village’s artillery. Candles flanked the piano, and from the moment I stepped inside, the storied space was alight with performance and song. Michael Metzner, a photography student and the evening’s impresario, performed original compositions. Hunter Jayne, a film student from Atlanta, accompanied him on guitar. Molly Schoolmeester and Emily Updegraff, both performing arts students, shared moving vocal performances. And Osayi Endolyn, a graduate student in the writing department, shared her essay, On Lacoste, an excerpt, which I share here. The entire evening was utterly enchanting, and to think that it was all inspired by SCAD students’ Lacoste encounters is merely one example of how influential the SCAD Lacoste experience truly is.
Vivre de son art
I visited several classes while in Lacoste and had the incredible opportunity to witness SCAD students living their art. A critique was in the works when I stopped by Professor Schroeder’s abstract painting class. Honor Bowman, a talented and zealous fine arts student stood in front of her abstractions of the human form, explaining her vision and process. To suffuse these human forms with unconventional line weight and texture, Honor and her fellow students had crafted petits pinceaux, or small brushes, from threads of lavender culled from the rolling fields that speckle the Luberon valley. Honor, I learned, assisted SCAD Lacoste’s summer visiting artist, Teresita Fernandez, and joined many other students just a few weeks ago to help install Fernandez’s evocative sculptural piece, Amethyst Cinema, in Galerie Pfriem. Working with a visiting artist who lives and creates beside us as a peer is a priceless experience for a fine arts student, Honor said. Indeed it is.
It’s often said that cubism was born in the hills of the Luberon, Picasso looking out from his window onto the rolling geometric shapes of villages that span the valley. This genre of inspiration is one that our students of SCAD Lacoste know all too well. And in the spirit of the long, illustrious line of artists and designers who have flocked to France for inspiration, they, too, will forever carry with them their vibrant memories of their time in France. In the words of Hemingway, Lacoste is a moveable feast.
Excerpt from On Lacoste
By Osayi Endolyn, M.F.A. writing student, SCAD Atlanta
If Paris is a woman, she’s a firecracker, that one – fabulous and chic, brilliant and posh, confident, arrogant – already a little over you before you’ve expressed your interest, but she’ll allow you to chase her anyway – it amuses her. If Lacoste is a woman, she’s your best friend, and you know it from the moment you look at her. She’s warm and welcoming and has a wise, sweet grandmother who thinks you need to eat more food. She leads a simple life, but isn’t simple herself. She observes more than she speaks, she’s generous and available, and when she smiles, it’s as though the galaxy has discovered its latest star.
[…]
I will remember the way the Lacoste sky holds pinks and greys with equal amounts of intensity and the moment I finally understood what Monet was trying to do. I will remember the taste of crisp, bright red and yellow cherry tomatoes, eaten straight off of the vine from my new friend’s farm. I will remember that la vallée Luberon never looks the same, and yet its classic image is burned onto my memory. I will remember the clock tower and the bell that consistently rings on time, which is three to five minutes late. I will remember hornets, beetles, bumblebees and scorpions and noticing that the urge to call Pest had left me. I will remember the wind, rolling and fluid, scented with hints of the lavender fields that make the landscape so inescapably vibrant.
[…]
But at heart, I know that what I will miss most about Lacoste are the Lacostois, the locals, the men and women who have grown up in and around this village. I will miss Robert, his music blasting everything from the Gypsy Kings to Michael Jackson. I will miss Marie and Laurent, their side-glances and murmured couple-conversation. I will miss the way Bruno corrects my verb conjugation and extends my list of French writers to read every time I see him. I will miss the way Renaldo, owner of Café de France – when asked what time he’s closing up, he never says a time, just bientôt, soon.
