Jeanette Le Grue`s

High
Drama
A
Jeanette Le Grue’s
keen color sense relies
on deep contrasts
By Virginia Campbell
silos is not the sort of painting in
which you’d expect to find much visual drama. Charm, yes. Warm tones of quiet
nostalgia, yes. A display of sure, even refined brushwork, perhaps. But vibrant, swirling
brushstrokes and clashes of dark and light to define a fundamentally tranquil scene?
Northern California plein-air painter Jeanette Le Grue creates this kind of drama so
often on her canvases that you can only assume she sees the whole world this way—as an
arena of pulsing color on the move amid the dynamics of light.
In her loose, wild, paint-happy picture MORNING AT SHELL BEACH, you see nearblack shadows of trees and rock dominating at least a third of the painting, setting off
the brilliant blues of the water, revealing the yellows in the rocks, and
ultimately suggesting a world of kaleidoscopic flux. Most people
wouldn’t see the scene this way even if they looked at it in the exact
moments Le Grue did. Most painters would probably not paint the
beach in this light, or lack thereof.
MORNING AT SHELL BEACH relies on palpitating color patches
rather than on linear definition to give form to its subject. “I was born
with a strong sense of color,” says Le Grue. “As a child I did paint-bynumber pictures, but I never followed the directions about which colors
to use. I chose what I wanted.” The drawing of shapes was never the
dynamic that appealed to her, whereas putting down color notes, one in
relation to another, resulted in scenes and still lifes that packed emotion. Franz Bischoff and
Joaquin Sorolla are two colorists whose work Le Grue takes to heart. A third is the Russianborn Sergei Bongart, an émigré who lived and taught in Santa Monica, CA, until his death
A PICTURE OF A CONVENTIONAL BARN WITH TIRED
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OPPOSITE PAGE: RED WINE
DAHLIAS, OIL, 24 X 29.
ABOVE: MORNING AT SHELL
BEACH, OIL, 14 X 18.
RIGHT: LEANING SILOS, OIL,
16 X 20.
JEANETTE LE GRUE
in 1985. His one-time studio assistant, painter Don
Ricks, was one of Le Grue’s teachers. Paintings by
these four artists all feature generously deployed color
that builds bold compositions, and their works provide
a clear, definitive backdrop to Le Grue’s vision.
I
but in the end irresistible, to
draw connections between Le Grue’s early life and
her zest for a deeply dappled reality. She was born in
1952, the middle child of restaurant owners on
Kodiak Island: “Alaska’s Emerald Isle,” famous for its
bears, crabs, and ferociously green summer hues. Her
IT IS PROBABLY FACILE,
STACKED CUPS, OIL, 11 X 14.
father, who’d served in the Pacific in World War II,
had always wanted to be a painter, but had settled in
Kodiak with her mother following the war and
created a harbor restaurant instead.
Le Grue was a gifted painter early on. “There
never was anything else I wanted or even could do,”
says the artist. “I always thought I was going to be
good, and I always thought I was making good
progress.” The world in which this visually oriented
artist wandered as a child was full of contrasts—
shadows that were long and curiously hued, years
that were split between long, partly sunless winters
and short, partly darkless summers.
To these visual contrasts came a dramatic event.
In 1964 Alaska was struck by the largest earthquake
ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, a 9.0 that
lasted four minutes and was followed by a catastrophic
tsunami. She was 12 and remembers it vividly: “When
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the quake started my father hurried us all to the living
room into a huddle and put his arms around us.
When the shaking stopped, I saw a wall of water
approach, so large and soon so close I could see the
dark spots of sea animals and fish in the middle of it.
We all ran from the house—we barely made it—and
worked our way up Pillar Mountain where we stayed
three days. Experiences like that make you realize how
small you are, and that you have no real control.”
The Le Grues’ home was washed into the lake
behind it, and their restaurant was washed into the
ocean. Le Grue and her siblings spent a year in
Vancouver with her grandparents while her
parents recovered in a singular way—they
bought a 1927 Scottish oceanliner, drove it
into the waterway that now joined the ocean to
what had been the lake behind them, and
opened a new and unique restaurant.
Meanwhile, Le Grue proceeded to finish junior
high and high school, painting steadily with the
encouragement of an art teacher who was
himself a professional painter. She sold her first
painting as a senior for the hefty sum of $500.
The drama of the natural world imposed itself
on Le Grue in an even more personally devastating
way several years later, when she had married and
had two small children. Her husband, a fisherman,
drowned when his boat sank in rough seas. The
boat’s skipper—its lone survivor and her husband’s
best friend—was rescued after three days in the
water. Two years later she married him, and they
moved south to Moon Valley, inland from Santa Rosa in
Northern California, and she had two more children.
Through all this she painted, mostly still lifes, partly
because that’s what she could manage with children to
look after, and partly because, after the vivid contrasts of
the Alaskan landscape, the dry, grassy hills of Northern
California seemed so bland to her. “I thought it was so
washed out, there wasn’t any color at all,” she
remembers. “Everything was just brown. It took a
couple of years to start to see the color.”
Throughout Le Grue’s first decade in California,
she was largely self-taught in her painting, building her
personal experience onto a foundation of innate color
sense. Her first studio was an old trailer in the back
yard of her home. Her studying was done at workshops
with artists like Ricks, Charles Movalli, and Kevin
Macpherson. She could have gotten a scholarship to art
school back when she graduated from high school, but
opted against it then and thereafter. “I’m glad I learned
the way I did, because I’ve been able to stay true to
who I am,” she says. On her own she read the texts on
painting that everyone reads—Hawthorne and Carlsen
and others—and she studied Sergei Bongart’s writings
as well. In fact, for someone who never went to art
school, she’s studied quite a lot, and she’s also taught
workshops herself for years now, and finds them
learning experiences as well: “When you teach, you
have to verbalize ideas for yourself, too, and it helps to
clarify things.”
When Le Grue’s second marriage
ended after 11 years, she was at a
point in her development as an artist
where she was able to support her
four children. She had already begun
to favor painting the landscape
around her Santa Rosa home, while
continuing to do still lifes. Three years
after her divorce, when she’d
undertaken skydiving for fun (what’s
scary about throwing yourself out of a
plane when you’ve been through an
earthquake and a tsunami?) and was
taking up skin-diving, she met the
man she would marry three years
later. Now, a decade later, after
raising her four children and his two,
they live together in a unique place
that fittingly serves as a dramatic
contrast to the place she was born in.
“Sorolla said somewhere that a
key to success is having a strong
attachment to a place,” says Le Grue.
“For me, that place is Tomales, California, where I
live now. It’s a small, historical village, about 240
people, the last little village in Marin County, about
an hour north of San Francisco. It looks the way it did
in the 19th century. The people are a mix of old-time
ranchers and artists, writers, and professional people.
Our house is right downtown, a wood building that
was built as a bakery in 1860. My studio used to be a
stable. I’m still falling in love with the area after four
years of living here. I’ve done lots of plein-air painting
here, all within a quarter mile of our home.”
TOMALES CHURCH, with its orange shadows and
flesh-colored lawn that Le Grue renders in creamy brush
strokes, is not a quaint sight she snapped pictures of on
a trip and took home to convert to a well-behaved
landscape painting. She can actually see this church from
her door, and she painted it en plein air in a fell swoop
just as it appears. She can walk effortlessly to the sites of
almost every painting she does now, and she feels she’s
just cracking the surface of the Tomales area’s visual
riches. “The more ranchers I get to know,” she explains,
“the more private property I can go onto and paint.”
Le Grue has won a whole slate of awards and sells
her work at a healthy clip these days. Her professional
satisfaction and personal happiness are at all-time
highs. She can discuss theories of color and summarize
ideas about value, intensity, and temperature, but her
DAIRY HOUSE, OIL, 16 X 20.
own gut response to deep color contrasts is what
makes her eager to paint: “I’m feeling it and seeing
it,” she says, “and all I want to do is translate that.”
Intellectual abstractions evaporate in the fresh air and
California light. “You have to learn a lot and then
forget about it,” recommends Le Grue. “Then you
just become a vehicle and let it all come out.” ❏
Virginia Campbell, the former editor in chief of Movieline, has
also written for Elle Décor, Departures, and Traditional Home.
Le Grue is represented by Lee Youngman Galleries,
Calistoga, CA; William Lester Gallery, Point Reyes Station,
CA; Nancy Dodds Gallery, Carmel, CA; Portico Gallery,
Montecito, CA; Debra Huse Gallery, Balboa Island, CA; and
Mountains Edge Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM.
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