Tadelakt and Flood

I just finished a course in Tadelakt which took place in the hills around Maubec, south of France. It was an excellent course, taught by a Moroccan decorator named Jamal Daddis, author of the book, Le Tadelakt. If you are interested you can find this on Amazon.

Tadelakt is a form of lime which, when finished and polished correctly has the ambiance of marble but unlike marble is warm, impermiable to water, easily sculpted and extremely nice to look at and touch.

Great course, taught by a great teacher.

While we were studying, it began to rain and it rained hard. It didn't stop for 24 hours and many people were flooded out. All day today was spent helping people to get the waves of mud out of their houses. One local person had a pool of water around their house which was a metre and a half deep. That's about five feet. So their entire house was swamped. A few locals, the pompiers, myself and my father in law, spent the day separating their things from the mud and stones washed in by the waves of water. It looked like a complete disaster but by the end of the day we had made huge progress. Drains were unblocked and the mud cleared away. There's more to do tomorrow but it's looking good.

Here's a photo of an orchard beside the house that was flooded. Below that is a photo of the course in tadelakt.

Icons

Yesterday, after setting up in the atelier in Bastile, I visited two exhibitions that I had been curious about. One was in Nation. An exhibition by an Icon Painter who studied in Greece. The exhibition took place in a small gallery on the second floor of the Centre Culturel Franco-Japonais, 8 Passage Turqueti, 75011 Paris. Metro -Nation. The artist is Dominique Groffe.

The artist has reproduced paintings of icons on wood using gold and tempera (egg). I'm interested in this because it's a subject that I'm studying at the moment. By doing the course you learn an enormous amount about the history of painting (as far back as the Egyptians) and you discover some of the most unlikely mediums with which you can paint and which last for thousands of years.

Although I like the artists ability to recreate the icons of past artists, I didn't see anything new being explored in the work. Creating an icon where the subject is religious is like a prayer for many people. A meditation and study of past works and as such gives a great deal of personal pleasure. The original images are full of hidden meanings as well and were not merely decorations. So that is also a study of history in itself.

It's fantastic to see this kind of work still being done. Otherwise it just disappears forever.