Painting my daughter at lakeside started it all

PAINTER Emma de Vazelhes first realised she was good enough to exhibit her work on her own more than 30 years ago.

She was living near Lake Geneva in Switzerland when she took a photograph of her eldest daughter, Amélie, then about three, kneeling in the water and throwing pebbles and then painted the scene.

“It really made me think, ‘Okay, I can go and have an exhibition of my own now’,” says Emma, whose latest show opens at the Old Fire Station Gallery in Henley today (Thursday).

Emma, 52, lives with her partner in Culham, near Abingdon, but spent many years abroad with her former husband, a Frenchman, and has three daughters.

Originally from the Cotswolds, she took art at A-level before moving to Paris in 1994, where she studied French at Alliance
Française.

She then spent four years studying art at the Jardin d’Acclimatation atelier with the artist Chantal Requichot and exhibited with her.

“We did the Martineau method, which was created by Jeanette Martineau in Paris during the Thirties.

“This was based on the idea that art was a platform for initiating creativity in other aspects of life.

“It was supposed to kind of awaken the creative process so that you became more creative in other areas.”

Emma then moved to Switzerland and painted in a private studio in Rolle, a small town situated on the north-western shore of Lake Geneva.

She lived there for 12 years and had her children, Amélie, now 25, Léonor, 23, and Marielle, 17.

“I took inspiration from there to carry on painting and had a couple of exhibitions,” says Emma, who describes herself as a colourist rather than an artist.

“I’ve always been a colourist — that’s what Chantal told me in Paris.

“It was because of the colours I used, like I would paint a dog green, not a normal colour.

“Chantal said, ‘Oh, you’re definitely more of a colourist than an artist’, and that has kind of stayed with me as well as the Martineau method that we were using which was to awaken other areas. It kind of got me into fashion.”

When she moved back to England in 2012 she continued to use her creativity by becoming a personal stylist.

Emma says: “I studied colour analysis, so a bit like Colour Me Beautiful, where people take colours that look good on different people.

“I was still doing painting as a hobby. Then everything changed after covid and styling was not the same.

“I felt like I wasn’t being creative and I was missing something, so I decided to give up the styling and just paint full-time.”

Her latest exhibition is called “Chromatic journey: fauna, flora and life in figurative forms” as it reflects her eclectic works in different mediums as well as her love of nature, wildlife, flowers and water.

“I’m getting ideas all the time, every day,” says Emma.

“I’m inspired by colour, a lot of which is in my paintings of flowers, trees and nature. I love to paint horses too. We live literally one field away from the River Thames, so I’ve got some really good areas where I can take photos and then paint them. The countryside around here is lovely.

“I also look through my images that I’ve collected over the years and get inspiration from those.

“I paint a real mixture of subjects so people who come to the exhibition will probably think that it looks like lots of different artists are taking part.

“You’ve got some chalk on black paper and there’s a few watercolours but the majority of it is oil on canvas using a palette knife. I’m still looking for my specific style and am constantly experimenting.

“I love it and do it every day — I get lost for hours doing it.”

Emma’s daughters are very supportive. “They really like what I do and have always been my biggest foundation,” she says.

“Léonor, who is living in Paris, has helped me a lot with putting together the posters for the exhibition and helping me with my website. Marielle is the social media guru.”

In fact, the exhibition will be something of a family affair as Emma’s brother, artist Ian Woodford, from Falmouth, will be exhibiting some of his artworks as well.

“He does slightly smaller-scale paintings and very figurative so they almost look like photographs,” she says. “He paints boats and outré nudes, that kind of thing, and does them very precisely. He actually lives on a boat.”

And what happened to that painting of Amélie at the lake?

“I’ve still got it in my private collection at home,” says Emma. “Everyone that sees it loves it.”

• “Chromatic journey: fauna, flora and life in figurative forms” by Emma de Vazelhes is at the Old Fire Station Gallery, 52 Market Place, Henley, until Monday, July 1, open from 10am to 4pm daily. The artist will be on hand each day to talk about her work. For more information, visit emmawoodford.
art