The Inception of Empilage

a supplement to

Every Stroke of Pencil or Brush Is a Decision

by  Christian Joseph-Angelique

& to

Ocean Beach Drum Circle

Giving Shape to the Wind

another related work

of  Christian Joseph-Angelique

These three works were the first to be done in a style that the artist refers to as empilage (which might be translated from the French as “stacking up” or “piling up”).   Other styles that the artist had already been using for quite some time are also mixed in.

On the 24th of January 2003, the artist made the first use of his empilage style, with the picture Empilage I—The Desert, Lonepine, California.

Once he’d completed this first one and could start to see what empilage is and what it might be able to become, he followed up with an improved version of the same subject, Empilage II—The Desert, Lonepine, California, mixing two of the artist’s other styles in with empilage.

As the artist started to work on rendering the rocks in the lower right corner, he realized that the hills in the middleground should be drawn in the same way.

Along the bottom, flowing from out of the rocks, is the Owens Valley River.   This is drawn in a style he calls carré (French for “square”), which he’d been utilizing since the early ’90s.   The blades of grass and ochre-colored stalks along the riverbank are also in this style.

The orange and green plants on the right edge are done in what he considers to be a primary style: rond (“round”).

He then advanced the empilage style yet further, in the picture Empilage III—In the High Sierra.

Depicting a moonlit night scene has allowed the colors in the picture to be more muted, with much slighter differences in shades and hues.   With this distinctly higher color resolution, the image gains a richer subtlety and deeper nuance in color variation.

In this picture, among the artist’s different styles, he again makes use of these same three: empilage, carré, and rond.

These first three pieces were all done with gouache and oil pastel on paper.

“I like the idea of mixing oil and water.   What unites them is the paper.   I’ve always been lucky in finding my media—using a tool in a creative way.”

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