Our guest is an author and screenwriter; he recorded observational drawings accompanied by comments in his notebooks, a practice that he began in his childhood and continued systematically into adulthood.
When he draws, Emmanuel Guibert likes to navigate between different techniques, because for him all tools are creative, and it is with this great freedom that he fills his sketchbooks, whether to speak to his deceased or to freeze this and there a word and moments experienced by anonymous people on the Dieppe coast, between the landing beaches and the countryside.
Today he presents the third volume of his Legends: the sea in the countryside, published by Dupuis in the l’Aire libre collection. Previous volumes in the series Drawing in museums (2020) and Sleeping on public transport (2023) appeared in the same collection.
A mess and off we go again
Emmanuel Guibert remembers starting to sketch systematically at the age of 27, and then finding a method: “I stand in front of something that interests me, pleases me. When I was a little boy it could be a vacation spot that I could return to later when I came home, thanks to the sketch. Even today I kept the same protocol.”
The techniques come with the materials available, leaving the artist the possibility of drawing with whatever comes to hand. “When I arrived in this studio, without my notebook and my materials, I could have made a sketch with my coffee!“
More fleeting, the sketch above all allows the designer to catch on the fly what life presents at a given moment, and to fix it in the most expressive way. “I am willingly a portrait artist, there are plenty in my notebook. On the RER, there are a lot of people who pose in spite of themselves.”
The sketch is a lightning rod
For him, the sketch attracts to the designer people, animals, plants that he would not have encountered otherwise. “When we have on us a tool supposed to capture an element of our surroundings, this element begins to speak to us with particular eloquence.”
If the sketches are made without the intention of publishing them, they offer readers, once collected into a book, something special. “When a book is published, we also need someone, with their words, to validate the work we have accomplished. We make books because we think what they contain will interest people. When I hit the countryside with my boots and backpack, I hope those moments are valuable for readers. They are the fabric of my life.“
Sound clips:
- Mix of testimonies on Normandy, produced by Nicolas Berger
- Archive of Sempé, in Fluoroscopy, on France Inter, 11/20/1972
- Archive of photographer Didier Lefebvre, 2010
- Ending song: Gérard Lenormand, He
