8/27/2024

Charlotte Colt, a life in color

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This French-American former project manager at Dior - a New York dad, a Niçoise mom - gave up everything in 2019 to launch herself as an illustrator and artist, and return to live in Nice, the city of her childhood. Full box!

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She has been drawing since childhood - which she spent in Nice - always between two moves: ”My parents bought and sold our apartments to make real estate capital gains in the Port district, around Franck Pilatte Boulevard.” Thanks to her gallery owner father, Charlotte goes through museums and reads a lot (she is forbidden to watch television): ”On the French Riviera, there are fewer museums than in Paris, but they concentrate the greatest artists and masterpieces. I was constantly drawn to this infinite well of colors. I spent a very happy and multicultural childhood with my sister and my parents who took us on their trips, from the United States to Asia... They constantly stimulated us intellectually, artistically... Color accompanied us everywhere!”

After a preparatory literary class at Lycée Massena in Nice, a major business school in Grenoble and a master's degree at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris, Charlotte worked for Dior and set up an exhibition of works traveling between Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo, telling the artistic past of the famous designer, who was a gallery owner before becoming a fashion designer. She became a freelancer in communication and events, in particular for the Paris Opera and the Lum workshop, specialized in artistic direction. ”I was the conductor of a creative team, and seeing them constantly come up with plans and innovations for the biggest houses made me want to take back for good the paper and pencil that I had left behind, caught up in my life as a mother of two children.”

In 2019, Charlotte enrolled at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied an ancestral technique of drawing reproduction that was particularly rigorous. ”When I designed my own prints, I knew that everything else was over. I felt a call from the stomach, from the heart, a crazy love for inks.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, she confined herself to her husband and children with her parents in Nice. But back in Paris, Charlotte is moping: ”I had fits of sadness, tears that didn't stop, a deep sense of pain at not seeing a horizon line. I tried to fill this gap with Parisian museum life, but that was no longer enough. I needed the smells, the sea... I was still bottled with a teaspoon of seawater!”

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The couple therefore decided to settle in Nice, in the lively Place du Pin district, near the port. Her husband gets a job and Charlotte takes care of the children. During their naps, she draws relentlessly and posts the results on Instagram, which go viral. Her style? ”I am deeply nourished by the work of artists inspired by the Riviera: the paper-cuts of Matisse, the tattoos of Cocteau... I like to draw the profiles of the faces, the bodies, the scenes of my daily life... in a colorful abstraction.” Her first prints sold well, and thanks to her Parisian network, Charlotte was spotted to carry out “live drawings” for various brands: Dior Jewelry, Schiaparelli, Gucci, Gisou... The formats and the technique vary: pencil, watercolor, felt-tip pen, on postcard, large papers and monumental frescoes, such as the twelve-meter-long Azure constellation created in collaboration with the artist Alice Vande Walle for the Maybourne Riviera. For the bistro-wine bar “Les Oeillets”, located in the antique district of Nice, it represents profiles painted black. A second fresco made with marker pays tribute to chenins and good wine.

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Even the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice invites him to illustrate his exhibition “Fireworks” in 2022. For the opening, she created a pastel fresco live, inspired by the works presented. The successes keep coming! For the luxury watchmaker Vacheron Constantin, she redesigns the windows of the Monegasque store with new creations. Each of the paintings, through a dreamlike wireframe drawn freehand, becomes a tribute to the expertise of the House and to the Riviera. You can read the face of a craftsman, the intelligence of the hand, or the starry skies of moonphase complications watches. The French ready-to-wear brand “Drole de Monsieur” entrusts him with the task of creating patterns for their spring-summer 2023 collection. Each drawing was done freehand in Indian ink. For Guerlain, she designed the visual identity of a press trip, and for the jewelry collections of the Nice-based brand D1928, a specialist in cultured pearls, she created illustrations inspired by the most beautiful spots in the city.

Charlotte Colt touches everything and designs solid sycamore chairs made by Valère Jasson, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, and on ceramics by Inès Angelini, creator of the Riviera brand “Umami”, which celebrates the natural and authentic beauty of the earth. Charlotte adorns them with natural tones evoking marine ropes, organic forms of coastal fauna and flora, women mermaids and muses, objects that evoke the heritage of the Riviera, a whimsical, flowery, pure world... like a dream. ”What inspires me on the Côte d'Azur are the colors, the beach, the people... Here we have a parade of different personalities who are particularly inspiring: people from Nice and eager Parisians who come to spend the weekend. I get drunk on the smells, the color of the walls, the shutters... Nothing pleases me more than to contemplate the sea, with pink or purple shades depending on the mood of the weather. In the South, I feel like I'm letting my emotions go in color! You feel everything with exhilaration and you are constantly pierced, dazzled! Often, I work with ink in the evening, and instinctive animal colors come to me, red, orange, brown, or deep blue evoking the Girella Peacock, one of the most beautiful fish in the Mediterranean. I swim a lot in the sea, armed with my mask and snorkel, to observe the local ecosystem, full of colors. Then, I raise my head and I observe the ballet of feathers of seagulls, cormorants and parakeets that cross the sky in a jet of colors! Sometimes it's almost “junglesque”, like a painting by Douanier Rousseau. This mixture of scales, vegetable and animal materials nourishes me constantly, just like when I go to one of my favorite restaurants. I enjoy the velvety taste and colors of a peach, or the magic of gold that flows through my fingers, when I dip my bread in olive oil!”

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