THE HISTORY OF BLANCPAIN

JOURNEY TO JAPAN
The Tobu World Watch Fair in Tokyo was
held in August 2008. For this Japanese
exhibition, Gwenaëlle became an ambassador
of the great art nurtured in the La
Ferme engraving workshop. Her presence
on display at the Blancpain booth was
certainly noteworthy in this country of
etchings – paintings obtained from delicate
engraving on woodblocks. She gives
her impressions here.
“I had carte blanche in terms of the
design. I therefore chose to engrave Mount
Fuji so that the spectators would feel at
home with a landscape they know well.
Since I was pressed for time, I drew the
sketch in my hotel room. But I wasn’t able
to do the plaster stage so I wasn’t sure
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how well it was going to work,” she
says. Lacking the help of a scale model,
Gwenaëlle began her delicate work without
a safety net. This made her a little
apprehensive, especially given that she
was engraving her very first landscape.
However her fears quickly evaporated
thanks to the interest shown by the large
and undoubtedly knowledgeable crowd
– engraving is part of Japanese etching –
that gathered there. “People clustered
around the big screen that was showing
all of my movements via a camera placed
inside my binoculars. I could tell they
were clearly interested because they
would return later in the day to see how
much progress I had made.”