Fanette Mellier

Fanette: My book Panorama was conceived in a unique way. It reflects an event in my personal life: the acquisition, along with my husband Clément, of a small chalet not far from Paris, where we live. To us, this place represents a “dream location” nestled in the heart of “no man’s land”, the one and only we own.

I wanted to build Panorama around what this place represents, both materially as well as metaphorically. For a long time, I wanted to create a truthful and exclusive colourful narrative. In reality, the story of the book isn’t really about the chalet, it’s about the colour.

As with my other works, I began by sending a letter of intent to my publisher Alexandre Chaize. This letter referred to the definition of the word panorama:

• A circular picture painted in optical illusion.
• A vast landscape that can be seen from all sides.
• A succession of images perceived by the mind as one complete visual experience.

It also included the following intentions: The book follows in the footsteps already explored at Éditions du livre (cycle, colour, temporality, composition in sections, title volatility, absence of words…). But the project takes on a slightly more illustrative dimension, providing a pretext for exploring the form (unchanging) through the colour (whereas in Matryoshka, the form also evolves). So it’s a more detailed and narrative experiment, but also a more radical one. The overall form (shaping) is simple, but reverses the reading, in a vertical dimension.

On the publisher’s website, you’ll find this text, which sums up the book’s intentions in retrospect: “Panorama invites us to contemplate the same landscape, printed 24 times. Page after page, the colour variations reveal the passing of the hours and micro-periods of life. From the gentle warmth of a spring afternoon to the frost of night, nature awakens and then falls asleep. Observing the details becomes a child’s play: a chalet, a clock, a cat, a balloon, a glistening green… Fanette Mellier creates a world where ink layers draw a subtle and dizzying horizon.”

While I was working on the drawing, which took several weeks, I made progress on the synopsis of the book by writing all the narrative passages in advance, hour by hour and page by page. These passages correspond to the colour changes of the various elements, which are described in detail in my notes.

This synopsis was the subject of many discussions with Alexandre, who went so far as to create illustrations in order to check that the narrative flow was consistent.

Then, once the layout of the book had been completed (which was a very tedious phase!), I was involved in the final layer setting at the Art et Caractère printing house in Lavaur. Printing the book, which was supposed to take a day, took more than three, and I thought we’d never get to the end of the final layer setting… to the point where it seems to me that it would be out of the question to reprint the book one day.

Panorama is printed in a special way, as it is a mixture of four-colours and direct shades. The four-colours, in their “standardised” aspect, are used as a realistic coloured canvas.

The entire landscape was coloured beforehand in CMY, to form a chromatic base. The CMY inks were therefore printed first during the layer setting.

The 3 Pantones, black and white were then printed in stages. The Pantones correspond to the narrative: PMS 807 brings light, PMS Green intensifies and nuances the presence of green, and PMS 072 brings the night and refreshes the landscape.

Black is only used on 6 pages, between 12.05am and 5.10am, to vividly draw in the night shadows. White takes over from black. Between 6.15am and 11.20am, it brings the colours to life with a morning frost that gets lighter over the pages.

The complexity in terms of printing comes from the intersections and overlapping of the colour zones, because printing in several steps causes the paper fibres to move and makes it difficult to reproduce these mixtures of colours on a very fine scale…

To me, the result of this book is halfway between the impressionism of Water Lilies and In Search of Lost Time on the one hand — and the pop art of Maya the Bee and Où est Charlie? (Where’s Wally?) on the other…

The book has become such an integral part of my life that I often feel like I’m walking around “in my book” when I’m at the chalet.

And a strange thing to mention is the presence of animals. The main character in the book, the cat, was completely fictional when I wrote the book. After the book was published, he arrived and settled down overnight in the same place as in the book, in front of the window. This cat, who’s called Austin and belongs to the neighbours, always comes by when we spend time in the chalet. The frog and the glow-worm have also appeared over time, in the same place as in the book. It gave us goosebumps!

This permeability between the real world and the book has a mystical resonance to me.

Illustrations © Fanette Mellier. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

Panorama

Fanette Mellier

Éditions du livre, France, 2022

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Panorama is the contemplation of a single landscape printed 24 times, once for each hour of the day. Page after page, the changing colours reveal the passing hours and the little miracles that are part of any given day in a life.