Biography

Jean-Louis Morelle was born to schoolteacher parents on 2nd August 1945 in the Oise region of France.

At the age of six, at a bend in a mountain path, he observed a painter at his easel, covering his canvas with paint and making the landscape appear. So it was decided, he would be a painter.

The railway town of Creil, his place of birth and where he spent the first ten years of his life, would always be remembered by him - the sound of the train whistles, the dark sheen of the walls and the smell of humus under the hazlenut trees, not far away in the forest of Chantilly.

He can still hear his parents' voices teaching him spelling and counting. The painter he would become would remember this with surprise when he, himself, a teacher of the art of watercolours in his studio, would assess his own remarkable career.

He left Creil for Compiegne where he studied until his Baccalaureat exam. It was only a good mark in drawing which was to save his diploma, after the examiner wasn't at all impressed by his philosophy essay on art.

In 1966 he graduated as a secondary education teacher in drawing and plastic arts. But life would take him towards other activities.

For two years he visited the Montparnasse workshop of the painter Henri Goetz, in the former academy of André Lhote. A few painters there were still working in the cubist style, like the remainder of a perfume from the pre-1930s. He was also to paint portraits in oil, something which was almost provocative at a time when abstract art still reigned.

In the creative seed of the 1970s, he worked in the plastic arts, in the staging of concert shows of the Bourges Experimental Music Group (GMEB). To accompany the first sounds on the electro-acoustic band during these concerts, he drew and illustrated the tales live on an overhead projector. On the large screen, several metres wide, the shadow of his hand became gigantic; his feats and clumsiness too.

From 1970 to 1981, he continued oil painting but it never satisfied him. He engraved many etchings and became passionate about Rembrandt and the German painters from between the two world wars (Grosz and Otto Dix).

He became more involved in publishing, he lives from his work as a free-lance graphic designer and created many book covers. He breathed in the smells from the printing with excitement. His eye became well-trained in the correction of the four-colour printing process. In 1981, he diluted watercolours in his illustrator's airbrush. His squirrel-hair "petit gris" brush began to move little by little.

At the end of 1988, at last he experienced the revelation of a real sensory shock: watercolours are not pigments mixed with a little water, they are pigments which swim in the water and must rest calmly at the bottom of the lake. So begins a long observation.

He moved into his Montreuil workshop and founded the association "Workshops around the courtyard" with his artist friends, which would be in partnership with the town hall at the beginning, with the first public exhibitions of open-house artists' workshops in Montreuil. He exhibited his first freely-inspired watercolours there.

For the first time, he dared to paint what he saw before him : the mess of the workshop, daily objects, cars in the street. According to his encounters, his first portraits and female nudes were born.

Early 1993 he began to teach watercolours in his workshop. He thought out loud and questioning his students, he discovered that in his field there was a true matter for creative thought.

In 1997 he devotes one year to illustrate Marcel Proust's novel "One of Swann's loves" (Editions Nouvelle Librairie de France, Paris). Proust accompanies him in his own internal voyage, in between gentleness and anxiety. In 1999 his book, "Watercolours, creative water" ("Aquarelle, l'eau creatrice"), was published. In it he demonstrates his conception of a renewed style of watercolour painting. He conceives the principle of painting by adding the pigment to or removing it from the wet matter during the water's cycle, and he applies all the consequences of trichrome use to watercolours.

At the end of 2003 he evokes the doubts and events, which occur in his daily work, in his second book "Diary of a Watercolour Painter" ("Journal d’un aquarelliste"). Writing has become his ally in understanding further the conscience and act of sharing with others.

In 2005 he is today extending the link between text and image through his website, a new form of space.

In contrast to the book, the written and illustrated pages disappear to be replaced regularly by new ones. Nothing is everlasting and history continues…