Les Trois Ages Du Dragon Baligan

My first full sketch for the picture was in blue biro.  

amalgamating the two left panels the first full size sketch was in charcoal

It's been a cool summer with changeable weather

The space has no electricity.  To make best use of the light my back is to the window whilst working. I arranged my larger paintings about the walls for display and gave tours when people were interested.  I find painting a picture in public with a subject understood by that public both gratifying and motivating.  If the painted picture is a tired old media object, painting the picture in public is vital.  On the street art.

 A journalist for Ouest France was covering a yacht race back in early July.  He talked to me about my project, recorded the conversation and took a couple of pictures to make the short article below.

 

I had initially envisaged beginning the picture in April so as to finish in high summer when the port is busiest.  It was mid June when I actually began the painting and port visitors were already beginning to flow past my painting space.  I had imagined a much looser painting keeping more of the improvised lines of the early sketches.  But I lost some of this play in the final painting.  A cost of public performative painting was a defendable popular, illustrative and so easy-readable and explainable style.  

Throughout the day I would explain the story of the picture to general public both familiar and not with the legend and industrial projects depicted.  One Sunday afternoon I talked to two concrete workers from the nuclear construction site for an hour about my pictures and art.  After presenting my work to a family an 8 year old girl excitedly reported to her father 'being in that gallery was like being in that man's head'.

A Global Pandemic, A Local Monster & myTHself.

Wish lads had ya gobs n'arl tellyers aboot an arful storee,

Wisht lads had ya gobs coz arl tellyers aboot tha warrr-m.

I grew up in a valley with a legend of a terrible worm that continues to feed on my imagination.  Soon after I moved to Normandy I heard tell about a dragon that had once terrorized everyone around here.

The first time I walked toward the sea from my home along the sunken, hedge lined roads and scattered granite farm houses I discovered an incongruous brick housing estate similar to those housing estates I'd grown up amongst in North East England.  Walking through that estate I came to the high granite cliffs to see the sea and the sea cooled nuclear reactors built below.

The brick housing estate had been built by a German industrialist to house the workers for the coastal iron mine he had bought and modernized in 1907.

At the beach as a child I was fascinated by all the blue lines and marks on my fathers legs.  He had been a coal miner for the first 15years of his working life and these were the tattoos the coal dust had made on his body from small injuries whilst working.

Last summer I thought of making a picture of the local monster - the dragon, the mine, the power station. I wrote this short passage to frame the picture...

In the 4C the dragon Baligan ran amok around here, the only way the local population could appease him was to feed him their fresh children every so often.  Until one day a cross wielding Irish man (Saint Germaine Le Scot [?]) came surfing up the beach on a flaming wagon wheel (as seen in the local church stained glass windows)  Deploying intense devout faith power he banish/petrified the monster beneath the high sea cliffs of Flamanville.  Hosanna! On witnessing the power of faith to smite the beast everyone turned Christian.

1500 years later fellows exploring the foot of the cliffs became interested in the stones... Iron Ore!  by 1900 a pair of German brothers had bought the concession and got serious about mining one of the highest quality iron ore deposits in Europe.  Ore was mined from beneath the sea cliffs and taken back to the fatherland eventually on the purpose built offshore cable car...  some years later, on the Western front, it's very possible that once again the children of Flamanville were horrifically reunited with the transformed mineral ore their fathers had mined, as the steel of the German army. By the 1960's the iron mine was unviable but the site attracted another buyer.  In 1987 the nuclear reactors Flamanville 1 &2  came on line.  In 2007 the construction of Flamanville 3 began.  As of 2021 it was 10 years late and 5x over budget.

I've never done a project specific to this place where I've lived for 20 years.   Over the winter I wrote to the local authorities suggesting I'd a plan to make a picture to give them if they could provid me with a pubic facing studio. I thought making this picture in public would help bond both it and me to this place and I'd noticed empty retail units with large glass fronts at the local port that could be a virus proof public picture making space.  In Spring I presented my idea to a panel of masked local mayors and port managers, and on the 6th of June I was given the keys to a large empty building on the water front in my local port.  I began to make 'Les Trois Ages Du Dragon Baligan'. 

Wish lads had ya gobs n'arl tellyers aboot an ar-ful storee,

Wisht lads had ya gobs coz arl tellyers aboot tha warrr-m.

(here's Bryan Ferry singing the lines above in the song from the valley we both come from...  this 80's movie by Ken Russel is based on the same Lambton Worm legend - mostly dubbed into Hindi )