Biography
Jean Garonnaire is a French painter, etcher, author and illustrator of children's books, born March 13, 1945 in Saint-Étienne. After secondary studies at Charles and Adrien Dupuy high school in Puy-en-Velay, Jean Garonnaire decided at the age of fifteen to join his sister who had settled in Elbeuf where together they took lessons from an old Norman painter named Briand. . Grateful to this little-known tutor to whom he will claim to owe his technical knowledge of painting and his mode of perception of the sensitive world2, Jean Garonnaire was then, from 1962 to 1964, a student at the School of Applied Arts in Beaune, then shared between advertising design and a job at the newspaper Le Progrès de Lyon (Saint-Étienne edition) which supported his first personal exhibitions, in Saint-Étienne in 1967, in Firminy in 1969.
It was from 1973 that Jean Garonnaire became involved in writing and illustrating children's stories by imagining Le pays disappeared, a marvelous place whose Lilliputian inhabitants, from their house high in the trees, experience a bond with the sun. This first book was noticed by Bernard Clavel who, himself writing stories and short stories for children, asked him in 1974 for a collaboration that would become friendly and begin with Le voyage de la boule de neige.
Nationality