Conductor with a Brush

Though he has lived in the U.S. for 13 years, birdlike Bernard Lamotte must still go back to Paris to find the scenes he most likes to paint. Last week, the results of his latest visit hung in a Los Angeles gallery. Hollywood's well-heeled art lovers (including Designer Adrian and wife Janet Gaynor, Artur Rubinstein, Fanny Brice, Producer Buddy de Sylva) turned out in strength.

On the walls, some of Lamotte's paintings were as bright and cheerful as summer chintz; others seemed like twilit windows looking out on the rainswept streets, the darkening alleys, the lonely deserted shops that had caught his eye. Next week 36 Lamotte illustrations will appear in a $12.50 Limited Editions volume of Nana; light of hand but heavy with atmosphere, they are enough to give anyone that last-time-I-saw-Paris feeling.

For much of his life, Bernard Lamotte has wandered over those same streets and alleys searching for mood and color, sometimes in the company of friendly flics, who took him along on evening patrols through the dark corners of Paris.

"Painting," Bernard's father, an insurance clerk, warned, "is a hungry profession." But Bernard didn't go hungry long. Of his first 30 melancholy canvases ("Who will buy these dreary things?" his art dealer asked), he sold 26. He has been selling ever since.

Now, at 45, Bernard Lamotte is an amiable, agitated man who speaks at feverish speed, waving his hands and shrugging his shoulders to fill the holes in his broken English. Meticulous in his sketching, Lamotte spent five days before Chartres Cathedral last summer waiting for a cloud or a sunbeam to produce the effect he wanted, the light on the cathedral that he remembered from boyhood.

All over his sketches, Bernard scribbles shorthand notes on the time of day, the type of window frames, the age or make of an automobile, and then adds tiny numbers (one for light, ten for dark) that make up his color scheme. Even months later, "I can read the notes like a book--in three minutes."

Then, in his studio, with his oils and canvas, his notes and numbers to guide him, Bernard Lamotte begins the part of his job he likes best. "With me," says he, "my palette is an orchestra. I have all my colors before me, and I play with them. With my stick, I direct them onto the canvas. The black is the bass and the blue is the piano. I say to the yellow, 'I am coming for you,' and to the pink, 'Stay quiet.' Yes, when I paint I am the conductor--like Toscanini."

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