Jean-Pierre Dubord
Jean-Pierre Dubord was born in 1949 in Rouen, France where he continues to live today. He is largely a self-taught artist, though he did receive advice and support from his uncle who studied with the artist Gen Paul. He did accomplish some background study in Art History and Decorative Arts at the School of the Louvre in Paris, but he chose to concentrate his studies in Biochemistry for practical reasons.
In 1970, Dubord went to work for a pharmaceutical company as a chemist. In that same year, Jean-Pierre also had his first oil painting exhibition in Rouen. His work was reviewed favorably by the critics. Within several years, he was showing his work in galleries and salons throughout France and receiving awards in juried exhibitions. Eventually, he reduced his hours in the laboratory in order to have more time for painting.
The introduction of his work to the United States in 1986 brought such a dramatic response that Mr. Dubord soon left his position as a chemist to be a full-time painter.
Dubord is first and foremost a landscape painter. His delicate, finely-tuned canvases follow the Seine as it winds through Normandy from Paris to the English Channel. He paints winter and summer, and includes light and atmospheric effects which change constantly. He records village streets and modest dwellings, barge traffic on the river and the flower and vegetable gardens tended by his fellow Normans. When he paints the sea, Jean-Pierre gives us marvelous studies of water and sky in his harbor and beach scenes.
Though time and again, Dubord always turns to his home of Rouen for his inspirations. “Rouen is an inexhaustible interest for me. In the fog, or blanketed in snow, viewed from the surrounding hills, its magical cathedral spires dimly visible in the mist.”
The magazine Art Valeurs in March 1991, called Dubord “one of the great hopes of figurative painting today,” noting that the Rouen-born artist “has been well known in the region as an incomparable painter of atmospheric effects since he was quite young.” Mr. Dubord’s awards include the 1988 Prix d’ Honneur at the Concors des Marines in Honfleur.