Le Dépanneur
Do you know the Quebecois word “Dépanneur”?
It’s from the verb dépanner meaning ‘to fix’ or ‘to repair’, so a dépanneur is a handyman, and a dépanneuse is a tow truck. < Ahh, gender in French. Tradition hey!
Around here it also means ‘corner store’. I’m not sure if they used to carry a few hardware items, but my guess is the meaning is more like “We’re here to lend a hand.”
This shop is out of business, and the apartments upstairs are empty; the windows are hung with plastic, but the hand-sawn wooden sign is still up, with its vintage Coca-Cola medallions. Used to be, these places were all over the island, offering the basic groceries: a can of ravioli or a box of cereal, or more likely your sixer of beer, pack of cigs and assorted dirty magazines.
These days these shops are giving way to cafes and the occasional vape shop. We always used to joke they were backed by the mafia so they’d never go out of business. I don’t know if the mafia is trading up? or if they’ve just gone all in on road maintenance for their money laundering.
So that’s the kind of little sketch I’m doing these days. About 5 inches high if that? Just sitting in a back alley, chatting with a buddy from USK and enjoying the last days of summer :)
Citizen Sketcher 
Lovely to see your ink and wash again, I missed it!!!
love these!!!!
well… I love these small sketches and the stories behind them….
I love what I’m seeing—the shaky lines, the incompleteness, the white sky, and that sketchy look. It feels alive, captured in just a few strokes. It’s a little bit of graphite that directs the flowing fluid. It’s watercolor. Marc is back!
I, too, always love seeing your sketches. To me, they’re quirky and just enough off the beaten path to be delightful. When I started my own journey with watercolor painting about 6 years ago, YOU were the first artist to capture my imagination and inspire my efforts. I still follow you, and often wish you were teaching. Is that something you tried years ago, and just didn’t care for?
In any event, I look forward to your posts, paintings, and sketches!
check out Craftsy, he’s got some classes there.
Thank you for that, but I have taken his classes on craftsy. I meant in-person classes in the US. 😊
Hey Susan, thanks for the note. It’s always great to hear from a reader, and I hope I’ve helped you get involved with your local urban sketchers! :) I’m sorry about the teaching. I was very involved with travel and teaching a few years back, but we all get older, the family becomes more important, and then other things open up. I’ve been doing a lot more writing these days (fiction). It’s a bit of a character flaw, but I’m only able to do one thing at time :) Hyperfocus personality. I find I’ve lost the daily engagement with sketching that made it possible to do live demos and critiques. It’s much like music. You must be continually in practice!
Dépanner also means to get out of trouble/out of a bind. So a dépanneur is there to save you if you run out of milk.
Une dépanneuse is there to save you if your car runs out of gas or breaks down.
I think dépanner means place where you can go to get last minute needs like milk and bread when you run out. So it helps you out (dépanne) when you have an urgent need.
Sweet! Do you draw lines in pencil or pen first or do you add those marks later after painting is completed?
Hey Robin, yes it’s pencil first and the wash to finish. I try to draw a *little* as possible, while still seeing the shapes :)
I love your loose sketches and I’ve been trying for that look for a while and I’m getting there more and more by drawing directly in ink with a single line as much as possible.
Yes exactly Gina! It’s the speed that gives you the freshness :) No time to second guess :)
Marc, I always enjoy getting your newsletters ( of would you call this a blog?) This one brings back memories of visiting my brother several years ago when he lived in Lachine. We used to walk to the local dépanneur in the morning to get a paper and a coffee. I thought the word related to ‘du pain.’ (This shows my limited french vocabulary, haha! ) My thinking was that it was the local shop to pick up a loaf of bread or milk, etc. Anyway, my thinking is that there’s a lot of these local mom & pop little neighbourhood stores that are disappearing and what better way to keep their memory alive than to sketch them. That would be a fun challenge….to fill a sketchbook with sketches of local historic shops in your community then share them with the USK community. I’ve sketched many of the heritage houses in my own community, but this little bit of history is worth documenting as well.
Looking forward to your next update (and oh, if you do some sketches of those houses with the spiral staircases in Montreal, would love to see them!)
Peri
beautiful as always!
How fun and easy looking, thanks for sending!