by François & Jeanne Desjardins

Thanks for the recent plug for Apples and Art!  I must admit I loved your final question: “ Are you one of them? Let us know why you’re in.”  So I couldn’t resist and here’s my answer!  

Why do we participate in the Apples and Art studio tour?  Probably a good question to ask ourselves just weeks before our sixth year doing this. In any case, the answer I’ll provide is a very personal one given the particular context of a husband and wife sharing a home studio space, one investigating the limits of digital photography and the other exploring her personal visual universe with acrylic on large canvases.  

To add further context, we both try to participate–when possible–in local group shows as these do a wonderful job of getting one’s artwork in front of a local crowd.  Such events also tend to be very interesting social gatherings around art and quite often, artists get to briefly discuss one of their works with an interested visitor to say nothing of the potential for sales, of course. These shows are usually very well attended and play a crucial role in enriching the local culture. They definitely contribute to the overall art awareness in the community.

A studio tour such as Apples and Art offers something different to both of us as well as to the visitor. It changes how we work, it tends to bring in a different group of visitors and the show itself tends to create a completely different discussion space.  

Opening our studio space to the public gives each of us an opportunity to prepare and show a very personal curated body of work.  This means that instead of selecting a couple of individual pieces to stands alone, we can set up our work on the walls in such a manner as to allow the visitors to, in a sense, “read” a body of work as a complete story, something like reading a book compared to reading a sentence.  This also means that preparing for such an event does have an impact on how we approach our work, we no longer think solely in single frames but also in series, or even sequences. 

This kind of thinking has had tremendous impact on how we approach the creative process.  The unique nature of each frame or canvas is no longer a limiting factor in the story to be told.  The idea of some repetitive elements presented in series with variations in each individual piece allows us to  present evolving concepts, reinforce some elements or even present contradictions, which would be difficult to achieve in single frames. 

Finally, all of this culminates in the weekend when we can engage in very interesting and sometimes challenging discussions with members of the public, many from outside the immediate area.  The visitors we have been getting in our studio over the past six years tend to have a broad variety of expectations, knowledge and experiences, thus generating far more questions and comments, inevitably contributing to our own creative thinking.

Such an exercise may not be for everyone, but for us, it works.

The 33rd Annual Apples & Art tour is 28 & 29 September, 10:00 – 16:00 www.applesandart.ca