It was in crafts that he expressed his art upon returning from his military service, a hairdresser like his father with whom he set up a business in Salles-Lavalette in addition to the family salon in Villebois. And it is in the den of this new company that the creation of the famous painting takes place: “The hairdresser who we succeeded at Salles-Lavalette had died a year ago, his clientele had gone elsewhere and it took time to reconstitute it. » Time to kill for the young craftsman who finds it difficult to sit idle in his living room. So in the back room, he sets up a sort of workshop for his painting.
2,000 hours of work
“I soaked the shells in water, but I took them in the season when they were thickest,” he explains, “then I stripped them of all their inner skins, I colored them in the living room of Villebois, and finally assembled them in Salles. » 2,000 hours of work, here is Claude Chabanne’s estimate to complete this work which is a reproduction of an artist whose name he took.
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Among the winners of the manual feat of the Adolphe-Lafont scholarships (1), in Paris, in 1979 and 1980, he must admit to wincing a little at the recent estimate made by an auctioneer in Angoulême: 3,000 euros. “At that price, I’m not selling it,” he says, and yet it is he who is looking for a buyer, an enthusiast who would take care of this work and give it a new life. . “I don’t want it to end up in an attic, or to be put in the corner, and I’m not sure it will interest my children very much. »
So here is his bottle in the sea a few days before the holidays for the man who was best known in the sector for being an operetta singer with a golden voice, author of seven albums including several original songs, including “La chance aux songs” by Pascal Sevran. But that’s another story.
(1) Adolphe Lafont is a French professional clothing company created in 1844 in Lyon. She was the first to invent overalls which were later perfected by Levi’s.
