Pont-Aven
After offering summer sessions in Pont Aven for the past four years the Institute for Studio Studies has chosen in 2008 to formalize the relationship with this historically significant town through Yale Summer Session.
Pont- Aven, a coastal village in Brittany, France will provide the context for the intensive studio work at the center of the Institute for Studio Studies’ (ISS) four-week program. Students’ independent studio research will begin with a conversation between faculty and each student over coffee at Café du Centre, the geographic and social center of the small town, and develop amidst Pont-Aven’s watermills, narrow streets, and its network of tidal canals. Students’ winding daily commutes from their homestay locations past patisseries, boat docks, and outdoor fish and vegetable markets to the Institute’s studios in a renovated stone farmhouse frequently provide important visual source material as students learn to image their ideas through painting and drawing. While occasional trips to the nearby town of Quimper and the Atlantic coastline provide crucial moments of renewal that allow for a subsequent deepening of focus, the Institute’s students primarily spend their days living like the local residents - sleeping, working, and eating amidst their Breton hosts and neighbors, doggedly pursuing their studio work with minimal distractions.
Surrounded by the verdant “Bois d’Amour” (the Forest of Love), crisscrossed by the Pont-Aven River, and marbled with such historic architecture as the 16th century Tremalo Chapel, Pont-Aven (population: 3,000) became a popular retreat location for artists in the 19th century. Paintings by Paul Gauguin, Paul Serusier, and others hang in the Musée de Pont-Aven as testament to Pont-Aven’s longstanding effectiveness as a hothouse for artistic productivity. Now well-known for “Traou Mad Galettes,” sugar cookies through which Brittany’s famous butter is transported around the world, Pont-Aven is a vibrant, friendly town that provides Institute students with access to France’s legendary gastronomic pleasures, a generous community, and the smell of the ocean. Since 2001 its residents have welcomed our students and provided essential support for our unusually rigorous studio practice.