Les Peintures
Filmed in a day with Bristol-based painter, Ann Hicks.
Some stories just need to be captured. When we heard this one, we couldn't resist making this short social history film purely for our own pleasure. We hope you enjoy it too!
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Read the transcript
The story of the painting really began in 1958. We had gone to the south of France for our annual holiday. We always had to go to France because the weather was so rotten here that we couldn't paint. So we'd gone to France, and on one morning we thought we'd go over to Antibes to see the Picasso Museum, which we duly did.
And then come lunchtime, we went down to the harbour to have a bite to eat. And I sat on a bollard, and Gerry liked the look of what he saw, and he took a photograph. And our friends just happened to take this photograph, which shows Gerry taking the photograph. Gerry kept on saying, I'd really like to do a painting from that photograph that I took.
But he didn't do anything about it until virtually 50 years later. Come 2010, he suddenly thought that he would like to do it there and then. So he set everything up, and then he said to me, You know, I've got a problem. I'm all right with everything else because I know the colour of the Mediterranean back to front.
I can do that from memory. But the only problem is that I have no colour or pattern reference for your skirt. And I thought about it for a moment, and then I said to him, I think I've got it in the cupboard. Now, this was 1958 that I was wearing it, and if you can imagine, this was 2010.
And I thought, I do hope I've got it. So I went and hunted, and sure enough, there it was. So he was able to work from it, and this is it. And he hung it in his studio, and he placed it in such a way that it looked as if my knee was under it.
And I think he painted a rather lovely picture.
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