Photographic art: "La coulée verte".
Artist: Jean-Thomas Bédard.
2012, L'Islet-sur-Mer, Bas-Saint-Laurent , Quebec, Canada.
Theme : Nature, : micro landscape, rock, low tide, shore, seashore, littoral, St. Lawrence River, St. Lawrence Estuary, foreshore, flats.
Technique: Digital photography.
Original size : 36 x 24 inches
Reproduction format: 18 x 12 inches / 45.72 x 30 x 48 cm, 24 x 16 inches / 60.96 cm x 40.64 cm and 36 x 24 inches / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
Dominant colors: Grey, green, mauve.
Hanging system included:
Floating frame
Artist's interpretation of the work:
La coulée verte is an appeal to the viewer's imagination. This rocky mass can be seen as a simple boulder still wet from high tide, but also as a high cliff along which the thin green strip of grass stretches down the slope. The image is actually a close-up of a modest-sized rock structure, but the near absence of clear spatial cues allows the imagination to see the bigger picture.
This photo was taken at low tide on the shore of l'Islet-sur-Mer in the Lower St. Lawrence in 2012, and is one of the first images in the series LITTORAL - Un fleuve, un regard, a series awarded at the Muse Photography Awards 2021 in the Fine Art Photography -Nature category and at the Neutral Density (ND) Photography Awards 2021, Fine Art category.
La coulée verte - Jean-Thomas Bédard
As an artist and committed environmentalist, Bédard creates exclusively with materials from nature, exploring the variables of an intimate geography that feeds on his sense of belonging to the territory.
For the past decade, he has traveled the shores of the St. Lawrence and its estuary, an emblematic place par excellence that has nourished the Quebecois imagination, to capture its essence. Using the shapes and textures captured on his coastline, the artist-photographer creates imaginary spaces, a kind of metaphor for the ties that humans maintain with their territory.
His work is divided into several series, each characterized by an original visual treatment. They evolve from micro-landscapes to digital collages evoking totemic figures or primitive deities, then turn to the fusion of several images to create a surreal or symbolic world. His vision is poetic and holistic, and his practice seeks to build bridges between nature and humanity. He invites us to transform our gaze from the narrative of human domination over nature to that of a collaborative nature of which human beings are as much a part as all other living beings.