"Fanch" Ledan (Born 1949) French/American, Signed and Numbered Serigraph. A nice view of a blue bay from a light-filled room. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered 82/495 in pencil bottom left. 

Overall Size: 29 3/4 x 32 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 20 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. 

Francois Ledan (best known by his nickname “Fanch”) was born in a small village in Brittany, France in 1949. The youngest child of a doctor and a dentist, he was a child prodigy often left to his own devices, with the resources to explore any and all curiosities. In his early teens he was sent to Paris to complete his education, eventually earning three bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, science, and philosophy by the age of nineteen. Ultimately, however, he discovered and was drawn to the city’s famed arts scene. While a student at the Ecole Superieure des Sciences Commerciales in 1968, Fanch’s artwork was accepted by several galleries and major European exhibitions, and he soon abandoned commercial design in favor of studying abstract painting. He traveled extensively, exploring art in various forms first across Europe, then Asia, and finally in America, where he enrolled in an MBS program at Sacramento State University in 1972. On the day he completed his degree he was offered his first solo exhibition in San Francisco, and spent the next fifteen years in California working full-time as an artist. By the early 90s he was having yearly exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv, gathering many collectors and admirers with his landscapes by blending realistic and surrealist elements together. Having been engaged with printmaking since his first solo show in 1973 he shifted from lithography to serigraphy when he found representation through Circle Gallery and Park West. Today his work is in hundreds of private, public, and corporate collections all over the world, and he divides most of his time between his home studio in the United States and the family estate in the northwest peninsula of France, having visited over 100 countries in his lifetime seeking inspiration from each one.