Ride & Create | Juliette Bruley

It is a truism that artists have a horror of the blank canvas, and writers of the fresh white page. How could one possibly spoil its infinite possibilities by making a mark? Sometimes it is in finding limitations that creativity is set free. And what for a painter could be more limiting, more awkward, than a bicycle frame?

Juliette Bruley is a born-and-bred Parisian, and also – if there can be such a thing – a born-and-bred cyclist. Growing up, she remembers her grandfather riding from Paris to Nice. While she hasn’t ridden quite that far, the bicycle has been her companion from her earliest years and today is her indispensable tool for her daily life in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris. It’s both a passion and the medium for her art.

As well as a love of cycling, Juliette also inherited a desire to understand how the world worked, to get under the skin of things. At the age of 17 these two things combined when she built her first fixed-gear bike. She began working in a bike shop as a mechanic, then got her qualifications and became a workshop manager.

But it was at a place called Stolen Garage that her passions became further intertwined. Here she learned the art of painting frames – Stolen Garage runs, to our knowledge, the only training course specifically for those people wishing to paint bicycles – and now she handles all the paint jobs that come through the Stolen workshop.

And what a workshop it is. One half of Stolen’s premises is a café and showroom, serving locally sourced, seasonal produce and coffee roasted in Paris, with a side of conviviality and cycle style; the other half, separated by a giant soundproof window, is where Stolen makes its custom frames from premium Columbus tubing, and fine-tunes, customises and repairs bicycles of all flavours. An ‘open kitchen’ concept but with bicycles on the menu, where you can come and drink a coffee and watch your very own frame take shape.

Juliette’s jobs might be resprays, or they might be the first time paint touches pristine metal. Sometimes customers come with a definite sense of what they want; sometimes they give her creative sensibility free rein. Either way, the responsibility is huge: to create something that satisfies her own artistic sense, corresponds to the customer’s wishes and respects the form of the bicycle.

This latter is no easy task. Traditional tubing is 1” in diameter, and even the oversized tubing more commonly used today is barely bigger. The angles and curves present challenges… and opportunities.

Stencils and masks can be drawn up digitally, but in the end, creating a compelling paint job on a bicycle requires projection, visualisation and a dynamic aesthetic sense. Colour is Juliette’s favourite aspect of the job. What colour would you like to smear across the landscape at 40 kilometres an hour?

Despite the limits of the traffic, the bicycle offers Juliette the freedom of the city streets. And since she recently became a parent, she has found out that the bicycle is for all seasons of our lives. Just as her parents did with her, she can’t wait to share her passion with young son. Who knows, perhaps a ride from Paris to Nice is still on the cards. There’ll be a coffee and a pastry waiting on the Café du Cycliste bar when she arrives.

Photos credit: Mathieu Pellerin