{"id":13342,"date":"2014-07-21T07:56:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T05:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.breigh.com\/wordpress\/?p=13342"},"modified":"2015-06-04T17:38:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T15:38:19","slug":"the-art-of-andre-debru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/archives\/13342","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Andre Debru"},"content":{"rendered":"

While on holiday in the south of France my husband and I went to visit the Roquefort caves<\/a> with my mother-in-law.\u00a0 On the way there we came across a roundabout with an art installation in the middle that caught our eye.\u00a0 I\u2019m generally not into art all that much but my MIL is an artist and both of us had a bit of a \u201cWOAH\u201d reaction as we were circling the roundabout.\u00a0 We kept going but on the way back I absolutely had to stop and have a look at it.<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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I wish I had gotten photos from another angle as well, because it\u2019s just so cool.\u00a0 The entire thing is made of different pieces of metal.\u00a0 It has a shepherd, the flock of sheep and a sheep herding dog in the back.<\/p>\n

Like I said, it\u2019s really rare that I get hyped up about an artist, but something about this really intrigued me.\u00a0 I had a closer look and saw his info on the chest of the shepherd.\u00a0 I took a photo so I could Google him the minute I was near an internet connection again because I just really loved this stuff!<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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The artist himself doesn\u2019t have a website, or bother with the internet at all, but I managed to find a few blogs written about people\u2019s visits to his workshop. There were photos of the grounds around the workshop and the art pieces he has on display and I pretty much decided that I absolutely had to get to that place as soon as possible.\u00a0 They also said that if he is there that you can go in and speak to him and he will show you around, so I made a plan for Xander and I to get up early one morning and drive to Aveyron<\/a> and check it out.<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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I took this wonky panorama photo with my mobile when we arrived.\u00a0 It was really, really cool!\u00a0 Standing from that spot you could see a lot of his pieces (not so much in the photo but you can take my word for it).\u00a0 We could see that he was in his workshop but before we went in to meet him we had to have a look around. I couldn\u2019t wait to see it all!<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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My favorite of all the pieces was this absolutely enormous elephant.\u00a0 Wow, I mean look at how massive it is next to Xander and I! \u00a0I can’t even imagine how much it must weigh, considering later, when we were in the workshop, I tried to pick up a sheep that only\u00a0come up to my knees and could barely lift it!<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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When we went into the workshop Andre greeted us and asked if we spoke French.\u00a0 He speaks no English at all so I wasn\u2019t able to communicate with him, but Xander knew enough French to ask him the questions I had and do some translating.\u00a0 They chatted while I looked around the workshop and took some photos.<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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\"Andre<\/a>
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He told Xander all about how his father, grandfather, great grandfater etc were all blacksmiths and then passed the trade down onto him.\u00a0 That is how he got started with working in metal and eventually lead to his artwork.\u00a0\u00a0 While we were there he was working on another installation of the sheep for a city somewhere in the southwest of France.<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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He also had two different sorts of smaller sheep for sale, ones made of metal strips like in the above photo and another made of smaller, more dense pieces of metal. \u00a0These are the ones I tried to lift and could barely get it off the ground… so yeah, imagine the weight of that elephant. Holy crap!<\/p>\n

\"Andre<\/a>
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Don\u2019t quote me on this but I think one of the smaller sheep were marked at about \u20ac240 or so, not bad considering the amount of sweat and work that goes into them. \u00a0 Knowing just from how much people undervalue the time, effort and cost\u00a0put into knitting items,\u00a0I have an entirely new perspective on the cost of handmade items and art pieces.<\/p>\n

He had an owl sculpture that I really loved, for \u20ac90 but it was marked as reserved.\u00a0 I SO wish I\u2019d taken a photo of it, grrr!\u00a0 If it hadn\u2019t been spoken for I would have taken it on the spot, even though I have nowhere to put it.\u00a0 Such a pity that I missed out on it, but when I do finally have a house with a garden I will make sure to visit him again on one of our trips down to visit the family.\u00a0 I\u2019d love an owl or a dog, but I\u2019m pretty sure Xander will push for one of the robots!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m so glad that I took the time to look him up, because I really love the work he does.\u00a0 To see his sculptures in person and to see how it puts together every tiny piece of metal to make these animals and people, it\u2019s just amazing! If you are ever exploring the Aveyron area, it\u2019s definitely worth stopping by!<\/p>\n

We ended up having a really wonderful day.\u00a0 We initially planned to just pop out and visit his workshop and then head back to my in-laws to bum around the pool, but we got so caught up in the beautiful scenery of the area that we spent almost the entire day driving around aimlessly.\u00a0 We just took in the views and enjoyed being out together, it was great.\u00a0 I will be posting those photos sometime soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While on holiday in the south of France my husband and I went to visit the Roquefort caves with my mother-in-law.\u00a0 On the way there we came across a roundabout with an art installation in the middle that caught our eye.\u00a0 I\u2019m generally not into art all that much but my MIL is an artist …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[811,809,810,813,880,879],"class_list":["post-13342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-travel","tag-andre-debru","tag-art","tag-artists","tag-featured","tag-france","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13342"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13351,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13342\/revisions\/13351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}