About
Jean-Claude Demeure is a French painter, printmaker and maker of artist’s books. Born in 1961 in Valenciennes, in the far north of France, Demeure lives and works in nearby Bavay, an old Roman town a few miles from the Belgian border.
Demeure first studied science at the University of Lille, then art at the École supérieure d’expression plastique in Tourcoing. For more than forty years his work has explored the tension between line and color, across three crafts that feed one another: painting, printmaking and the making of artist’s books. Motifs such as pollarded trees, hollyhocks and camellias run through it: they pass from one craft to another, change, sit side by side and return as variations. The work comes in series, each developed over one or more years and given a French title.
Most of his subjects belong to his everyday landscape: the hedgerows, orchards, woods and gardens of the Avesnois. Others come from books, with series after the Renaissance dream-romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, after Tasso’s enchanted garden of Armida, after the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, and after the raffia textiles of the Kuba people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Many of his paintings are large, up to 8 feet (2.4 meters) high, and some combine oil with collage and printed paper. His prints are mostly linocuts, with some woodcuts and lithographs, printed in very small editions.
Demeure teaches painting at the École supérieure d’art Dunkerque-Tourcoing, a public art school, on its Tourcoing campus. A specialist in Matisse, Demeure worked with the education department of the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the painter’s birthplace, where he led workshops and talks for adults around the collections.
Atelier Reine Brunehaut
Since 2003 Demeure and the artist Kti Vandamme have run the Atelier Reine Brunehaut from the house they share in Bavay. It takes its name from Brunhilda, a sixth-century Frankish queen whose statue stands in the town square. Local legend credits her with the Roman roads that still radiate from Bavay, known as the chaussées Brunehaut.
The atelier has presses and cases of lead type. It prints the two artists’ own books, in very short runs, and books made with other artists, such as Michel Canteloup, on texts by writers including Michel Deguy, Jacqueline Risset, Francis Ponge and Gilles Froger. A copy of Aragon’s Le Con d’Irène, a book Demeure made with linocuts by Vandamme, is held by the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.
