Lots of films feature painters, but who are the real artists responsible for conjuring up the actors’ on-screen masterpieces? In an archive feature for Elephant, writer Megan Williams set out to investigate just that, meeting the makers behind the starring paintings from a trio of films: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “I had three months to paint something that was supposed to look like a genius had worked on it for three years,” explains Hélène Delmaire, the artist behind the artworks for the latter, a romantic drama centred around a painstaking portrait-painting process. Discover how she did this, as well the other artists’ remarkable methods for conjuring art for the big screen here.
