Florence Marie, La Forge / The Forge

all images courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her website

Honfleur is a commune in France with over 6,700 inhabitants (January 2021), located on the south side of the river Seine where it flows into the Channel. 

Situated in the middle of a block of houses in the old city center, accessible via a side street through a gate in the rue de la Foulerie, there is a building that once housed a forge, a building whose interior and exterior these days have been transformed into an art environment.

The image above shows, seen from the side of the decorated garden, the entrance gate at the end of the side street.

Life and works

This art environment is an impressive creation by Florence Marie, who was born on April 17, 1946 in Le Havre, a commune also located at the mouth of the Seine, but then on the north side, diagonally opposite Honfleur.

At a young age Florence loved reading literature and after her school years in Le Havre, she went to Paris to study philosophy and theatre.

She was active in writing and painting and had a house with a small studio on the Place Saint-Georges in Montmartre.

In 1994, in her late 40s, she moved to Honfleur, where she had found new accommodation in the former forge building which, in addition to a large outdoor space, included a 400 m2 workshop and a house with several floors.

Here Florence Marie would realise her major project, in which, after renovating a messy wall in the outside space into a large fresco, she added all kinds of colourful creations to the exterior, as well as to the walls of the rooms of the residential building.

The images above and around give an impression of the various creations

.

Florence Marie, who did not have an art education, does not consider herself an art brut artist too.

She prefers to see herself as an adventurer, but an adventurer who has the books of writers such as Novalis, Virginia Woolf and Flaubert in her luggage, an adventurer who loves kings and queens, angels and symbols.

The decorations she made are certainly not small-scale, on the contrary, the creations that adorn the walls are often man-sized.

In the 2000 m² space outside there are even very large creations, mostly made of recycled material, such as the depiction of an angel of the apocalypse, provided with silver wings, announcing to a black Virgin the birth of a star child. 

And there is also a life-size giraffe hanging from the roof on a chimney, partly replacing it.

The interior of the house is also filled with a lot of fascinating creative work. The whole is a work of art in itself.

There are all kinds of sculptures, mosaic creations, stained glass cabinets, colorful furniture, painted carpets......

In one of the relatively spacious rooms inside, various events are organized nowadays, where music is alternated with dance, storytelling and the like. These are announced on Florence Marie's Facebook page.

An association Les Amis de la Forge has also been founded, which develops all kinds of activities to support and further develop Florence Marie's project.

Documentation

* Facebook

* Article on the website of the Honfleur tourist office

* Article by Marie Gratepanche on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

* Article on the website of  the Agnes Szaboova gallery

Florence Marie

La forge

25 rue de la Foulerie,

14600 Honfleur, dept Calvados, region Normandie, France

visitors  welcome on appointment

Google Streetview  access to the side street, which leads to the entrance of the garden

Mauno Suonpää; Pahkaparatiisi / Gnarl paradise

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation

Pahkaparatiisi is in English Gnarl Paradise and Gnarl stands for: a rough, knotty protuberance, especially on a tree. Just one more step and we begin to understand what it's all about: protuberance, that's an English word that means something like a knob, an outgrowth or a washout .....

The images in this article show the characteristics of the items collected in the art environment reviewed here, namely all kinds of outgrowths of trees in particular, which have a specific shape that is so appealing that, when brought together in an extensive collection, they radiate an artistic quality.

Life and works

The one who created this art environment is Mauno Suonpää, who was born in 1932 in  Huittinen, a community of around 9500 inhabitants in the region Satakunta in the south-west of Finland.

He was raised in a house outside the built-up area of ​​Huittinen, situated on a wooded area where the Gnarl Paradise would later be located and of which it is now a part.

He started working in the forest at the age of 15, first with the help of horses, later with a tractor bought in 1956.

Suonpää did his work in the forest with an open eye for special shapes and colours that nature brought out around him. He began to see that nature produces all kinds of shapes in which you can recognize figures of people, animals or all kinds of items.

And then, at a certain moment he began to collect everything that he saw as special in the forest.

Here are some examples of what Suonpää collected.

In the image above on the left, an animal with a snout, such as a beaver, can be seen, while in the image above on the right, it appears that an owl is looking out through a hole in a tree.

In the image above, the shape of a bird is very clearly recognizable.

Nature also produces items that can be seen as letters and numbers. The collection assembled by Suonpää includes 300 letters and 75 numbers formed by nature. 

The letters include the entire alphabet, and the numbers zero through nine can also be seen.

Suonpää has made every effort to ensure that the forest with the house where he grew up has retained its original, natural character as much as possible.

He has arranged that all special trees have been given a name and a number, placed on a copper plate, which is a cataloguing that can be of importance for future generations.

His work has not gone unnoticed in public administration circles, as he has received a medal from both the President of Finland and the city of Huttinen.

The site has become an art environment

Around the turn of the century Suonpää decided to transform the forest area and the buildings with the collection into an art environment that can be visited by the public. 

To this end, the existing accommodations have been transformed into exhibition rooms and there is a modest opportunity for visitors to use a consumption and buy souvenirs.

Documentation

* Website Pahkaparatiisi

* Article on the website of the Finnish Association for rurale culture and education MSL

* Article in local newspaper My Huittinen

Video

* Video by Selkäkankaan rölli (September 2023, YouTube, 38'57")

Mauno Suonpää

Pahkaparatiisi

Suonpääntie 43

32700  Huittinen, dept West-Finland, region Satakunta, Finland

in July open every day from 12-18, in other months visits on appointment

Google streetview

Max Manent, Le musée de l'insolite / The museum of the unusual

pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

Loriol-sur-Drôme is a commune of around 6,600 inhabitants, situated in the Rhône valley in the south of France, between Valence and Montélimar. 

In a street in the centre of this commune, not far from the town hall, there is a house with a large number of rooms, of which more than ten are lavishly decorated, as shown in the images around.

Life and works

The house named Musée de l'insolite was inhabited and provided with a unique exhibition by Max Manent (1925-2023), who was born in Montélimar, a little over twenty km south of Loriol-sur-Drôme.

Max Manent grew up in a family where the father was a nougat manufacturer and apparently a quite open-minded person, because at the age of 15 the boy was allowed to travel through France, something that was quite unusual at the time.

However, for the young man it was a pleasure to explore the world, and once he was an adult he lived abroad for a while and then he stayed in Paris, where he met many people, among whom a number of artists.

He became a painter, and he focused on only one subject: women…. Whether he followed a training course of several years to be a painter is not known.

In 1979, when Manent was in his mid-50s, he moved to Loriol, where he took up residence in the spacious house along the Grand Rue.

Settling in this house, Manent must have felt that this was his final destination, because he began to decorate the rooms he did not use for living, with all that he had collected during the previous many years

He would indeed stay there for more than 40 years, time enough to transform the interior into a special indoor art environment.

The more than ten rooms are filled with a variety of objects such as the hundreds of crucifixes in the very first image, a wall completely covered with all kinds of colorful drawings and posters, as in the image above, but also a collection of ten to twelve thousand cigar bands with special images, rare musical instruments,  matchboxes, African art .....

Manent also used a wall to exhibit some of his his own paintings

In some rooms children were not allowed, because what was shown there was not suitable for them. Manet had his own ideas about the unusual and the unexpected

A very special exhibit is the wooden coffin in which he could be carried to his grave, a coffin decorated with silhouettes of women. 

Max Manent passed away on October 30, 2023 at the age of 97.

Whether the coffin he had prepared was actually used at his funeral is not clear, like there also is no information about what's going to happen with the collection.

Documentation

* Article (2015) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

* Article (2012) in newspaper le Dauphine 

Max Manent

Le musée de l'insolite

28 Grande Rue 26270

Loriol-sur-Drome, dept Drome, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

currently the museum is closed

Seppo Laatunen, Ateljee Pikhahovi / Atelier Pihkahovi

pictures are screenprints from the video mentioned in the documentation

Located in the department of Southern Finland, the community of Jaala was independent, with a population of around 1,900, until it was merged with five other communities to form the municipality of Kouvola, one of the larger municipalities in Finland with over 80,000 inhabitants.

The man with the chain saw in the image above, Seppo Laatusen, has an atelier in the area around Jaala where he creates wooden sculptures, which not only decorate the studio, but are also displayed in a 0,5 hectare large wooded area near his home.

 

Life and works

Seppo Laatunen, who was born in 1938, showed an artistic disposition in his early years, which was evident from all kinds of wooden objects that he made himself at a young age. 

His mother, who had a hobby of making all kinds of drawings, recognized his talent for artistic work and she and her husband would have liked him to follow an art education, but their financial situation did not allow this.

A  nice event in Seppo's early years reveals something of his way of doing things

At the age of ten young Seppo and his brother went to help their father with logging in a nearby forest. Father sawed and split, the brothers stacked.

Mother had been given them flour, a few litres of buttermilk and some plates for lunch. When it was time to eat, Seppo cut a big hole in a tree stump to mix flour and buttermilk in, causing his father who was watching, to burst out laughing.

After primary school Laatunen went to work as a contractor in areas such as earthmoving and forestry. He was involved in draining marshes and maintaining forests.

Once an adult, he moved out on his own and bought a house in a wooded area, located halfway between the hamlets of Siikava and Hartola, close to his childhood home.

Although Laatunen made creations during his working life, he was only able to fully realise his potential when he retired around the year 2000.  In 2008 he built a spacious studio near his home, named Ateljee Pihkakov. where he could exhibit his sculptures. He also bought a half-acre piece of green area from a neighbour to display his larger creations.

The hundreds of wooden sculptures that Laatunen has created, cover a variety of themes. 

There is an interesting collection of creations that depict public figures, such as the former Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom and the American politician Donald Trump, above. 

Public figures from Finland. such as 11th president Tarja Halonen, and Juha Mieto, Finland’s skiing legend, just as well known personalities from other countries have been depicted also.

In the green area one can see a number of high rising sculptures that depict all kinds of personalities. some around four meters high.

Other sculptures depict animals, such as animals that live in the forest, but also crocodiles.

Most of the sculptures are of people or animals, but a small shed on the property contains a self-made wooden replica of a red car with an open roof, large enough for someone to sit behind the wheel. A surprise for a visitor when the door of the small garage is opened.

Documentation

* Article (October 2021) in newspaper MT Metsä (includes a 2.24m video)

* Article in a weblog about interesting spots in the community of Jaala

* Article on the website of the Finnish Association for Rural Culture and Education MSL

* Article on a regional edition of the Association MSL 

Seppo Laatunen

Ateljee Pikhahovi

Ahvenistontie 28, 

Hamlet Jaala, municipality of Kouvola, region Kymenlaakso, dept Southern Finland, Finland

visitors welcome

Google Streetview (with photos)

Annie André, La maison des poupées / The dollhouse

 

this photo and the next one by the Bannalec town hall

Bannalec is a French community with around 5700 inhabitants (2021), located in the department of Finistère in the region Brittany.

Life and works

In this community, in an ordinary house in an ordinary street, there is an extraordinary collection of more than a thousand dolls, decoratively arranged in most rooms of the house. The collection was assembled by Annie André and is open to visitors on certain days and by appointment.

Annie André grew up on a farm on the edge of the town of Bannalec, where her father bred horses. As an adult, she would work in a nursing home for the elderly. Currently she is retired.

It all started when she was thirty years old and somehow came into possession of a doll. She was apparently so impressed by this, that she started collecting dolls. She looked around at flea markets and thrift stores, and bought dolls there for little money. Once her new hobby had become known, dolls were also donated by families whose children had grown up.

Where necessary, Annie herself made new clothes for the dolls. And so, over the years the collection grew and grew, with a place of honor for her very first acquisition.

Around 2004, Annie André came to live in the house in the rue de la Gare. In 2008, she opened the house to visitors, some of whom became regulars and assisted her..

The collection gradually became better known, through the website of the municipality and also through articles in the local and regional press.

Collections of dolls elsewhere 

In the field of art environments in Europe there are more sites filled with a large collection of dolls, such as in France the (now disappeared) decorated facade of the house of Francis Barale in the Bouches-du-Rhône. 

In Russia there is the collection of Margarita Travkina, in the Czech Republic the one of Lubomir Votava, in Ukraine the one of Vasil Hlushkovski (now closed) and in Latvia the one of Daina Kučere.

Documentation

* Article on the website of the municipality of Bannalec

* Article (2023) on the website of regional journal Le Télégramme

* Article (2017) on the website of regional newspaper Ouest France

Annie André

La maison des poupées

33 rue de la Gare

29380 Bannalec, dept Finistère, region Brittany, France

visitors welcome on open days and on appointment,

see website of the municipality

Google Streetview

Giulio Rancilio, Giardino delle sculture / Sculpture garden

this image and the next five from the website Tipeek Photos, 
published here in agreement with the editors

The woman on a horse, pictured above, is part of a garden with sculptures that can be seen from the street in Castiglione d'Adda, a municipality with about 4,800 inhabitants in the Lombardy region in northern Italy.

Life and works

The garden, with about thirty large and small sculptures, is a creation of Guillo Rancillio (1938-2020).

He became a bricklayer by profession, a job he had to give up in 1995 when he was 57 years old, due to major heart surgery.

Already at a young age Rancillio loved making drawings, a hobby he continued as an adult and expanded with the creation of paintings, with religious themes and portraits of animals as his main subjects.

Remaining unmarried all his life, he lived in a house in the centre of Castiglione d'Adda, which had been acquired many years earlier by a grandfather. The house has a garden along the street.

In 2000 Rancilio began making sculptures, following the technique of first making models of chicken wire, over which layers of cement are then spread. Once dried, the creations were painted in colour.

He did this creative work with great passion and working passionately he tried to depict the subject as realistically as possible. 

All together Rancilio made about thirty sculptures, which were situated in front of his house in the garden along the street named Via Alfieri. 

Some of his work can be seen in the illustrations in this post.

The collection includes all kinds of animals, such as a dog, a white rearing horse (now disappeared), a monkey riding a red Alfetta Duetto and some crazy birds. 

People were also depicted, such as women on a horse or on a scooter, a little girl on a bicycle, a man with a helmet on a Vespa and an older man sitting on a stool at a round table.

He also made creations with a religious slant, such as a sculpture of Jesus.

The wall of the neighboring house, which borders the garden, contains a large painted scene, and in the interior of Rancilio's house there is a large mural inspired by da Vinci's The Last Supper.

Giulio Rancilio died on March 8, 2020 at age 81. 

It is not clear whether the house is now occupied again.

Documentation

* Article (undated) on the website Costruttori di Babele
* Article (2024) on the website Tipeek Photos

Giulio Rancilio

Sculpture garden

Via V. Alfieri, 74

26823 Castiglione d'Adda, region Lombardy. Italy

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview

Jean-Claude Villot, Intérieur décoré et jardin de sculptures / Decorated interior and sculpture garden

all pictures courtesy of Sonia Terhzaz

The scene above with sporty characters is set in an art environment in Baron, a small commune with around 1200 inhabitants (January 2021) in the Gironde area in the south of France. about thirty kilometers east of Bordeaux.

Life and works

This art environment is a creation of Jean-Claude Villot, who was born in the early 1960s, initially was a carpenter, later worked in a factory and nowadays is retired.

The art environment consists of two completely different types of creations, on the one hand a large field of sculptures situated in the exterior, as can be seen in the very first image, and on the other hand a number of decorated walls in the interior of the house whose occupants own the decorated field.

The pictures around give an idea of the decorated interior.

The house, that was occupied for many years by Villot's meanwhile deceased mother, is now the home of his sister and her husband, who inherited it.

Villot began decorating the walls around 2010.

His decorations have a light-hearted character, generally depicting events from everyday life, such as someone making a walk, a stream of water with fish swimming around or a dog being walked.

 

The field of sculptures

Around 2015 Villot began making sculptures from wooden pallets he collected at the local dump.

In agreement with his sister and her husband, these sculptures got a spot on the field they owned, located next to the house in which they now lived. 

It's a field with a generous size that can accommodate a large number of creations.

Because he mainly used pallets Villot's creations are predominantly two-dimensional. They have no artistic pretensions, but they are distinctly amusing to look at

Like the murals inside, they are made by Villot to depict an everyday event and to provide commentary on it, if that's convenient.

These current events can include anything, such as activities of all kinds of political figures, but also of wearers of yellow vests, a common wear in France in recent years for people demonstrating.

Sport does have its own place in his creative work, especially rugby. When in 2023 the rugby championships were held in France, Villot paid a lot of attention to this event by making a sculpture of Antoine Dupont, who is captain of the France national rugby team.

The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris also got a lot of attention.

There are also comic characters. 

Above we already encountered Tintin, and below on the left one can see Mickey Mouse.

The designation Ponpon le Cheval (Ponpon the horse) in the image below right is a tribute to a horse that helped in a vineyard in the French Languedoc area.

The sculpture garden is located north-west of the centre of the commune of Baron, along the departmental route D936, opposite the company Aquitaine Matériaux.

Documentation
* Article (August 2023) in newspaper France Bleu

Jean-Claude Villot

Decorated interior and sculpture garden

32 Route de Branne (also D936)

33750 Baron, dept Gironde, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

the sculpture garden can be seen from the road

Google Streetview