Estelle Lagarde didn’t set out to become an artist; she wanted to design and create jewelry, but a course in jewelry drawing and painting was to change her mind. “I suddenly started to find my real passion and ended up leaving the jewelry workshop behind to spend all my free time perfecting my art,” she shares. Her hard work paid off. As soon as she completed her studies, she was hired by Van Cleef & Arpels in Paris where she spent 18 months creating watercolors for the Maison’s creative department.
After a couple of years, she felt a desire to leave the capital and return to her family in Haute Savoie, and started using her artistic talents to decorate the enamel dials of Van Cleef & Arpels Poetic Complications. Specializing in grisaille enamel, and in particular the maison’s Pont des Amoureux collection, she would spend the next four years honing her craft before setting up on her own to be able to return to her beloved watercolors.
Today, she divides her time between jewelry and watch watercolors. For jewelers, she creates designs to assist them in the creation of their pieces, with drawings that show the measurements and volume of each piece. For watches, it is quite a different story as her work mostly consists of watercolors for communication purposes, social media, and so forth. “I participated in the launch of BA111OD’s Chapter 4 and was amazed at the buzz about it on social media. It was a great success and I was thrilled to see that we can sell a product with just a visual.”
But it is not only the big brands that want to get their hands on her paintings. “Today, I have the impression that my job is evolving; there is a part of it that concerns watchmaking and high jewelry, but it is also developing artistically in the sense that people are now buying my paintings because they like them, for what they are,” she notes.
She also offers online classes to share her passion with others. She started with physical classes, which became too timeconsuming, so she set up an online program with numerous video classes that are now accessed by both amateurs and design houses from all over the world.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, she is also working on creating her own brand of watches and high jewelry. Something tells me that we haven’t heard the last of Estelle Lagarde. She is definitely an artist who is going places!
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