During that time he experienced the underwater world, invented and engineered underwater submersibles, camera housings and dive gear, was given the moniker ‘Labanus,’ and became one of France’s most notable pioneer divers.

The young man had talent. His maritime and provincial landscapes begun in 1950, had the skill of realism and the school of French experimentalism that used knife and palette to inscribe what he saw. Soon enough young Andre saw blue everywhere. On the oceans of the world aboard ‘Calypso,’ the Cousteau vessel of exploration, Laban began painting underwater. He painted what he saw, what he imagined and what fantasies came to inspire him.

While no one can say with absolute definition that one person ‘invented’ painting underwater, Laban certainly is the father of the technique. He made blue from blue with surrealistic and realistic modifications of what he saw on his dives. His models became the sea around him.

Born on October 19, 1928, Andre Laban, to outward appearances, seemed shy. He had a sense of humor that became a trademark to a kind personality loved and admired by his fellow divers. The last time I saw Laban was in Antibes-Juan-les-Pins during an international film festival. I presented programs and films, Laban his paintings, books and fellowship.

The companion of the festival organizer told me that Laban had little money. He was scraping by, selling his art work to supplement meagre resources. His good heart usually gave away his underwater paintings that did not sell during exhibits or festivals. His wry sense of humor, subtle smile and vivid eyes betrayed emotion that could change; the same grand mirth that twinkled in his eyes became sadness.

Philippe Tailliez always attended these ceremonies. He was my long time friend, his wife from a village near my own mother’s in Brittany. I would stay with Tailliez and his wife Josie in Toulon. We would work on his book and projects, swim and dive in the cold Mediterranean. Tailliez was the father of modern diving. He was Cousteau’s superior officer in the French Navy, the man that brought Cousteau into diving and into the realm of underwater exploration with another friend Frederic Dumas. It was natural for Laban to take to Tailliez and offer him a painting. A special underwater work of art, no fanfare, no grandiose posing, a painting in vivid blue with almost pastel blue of Tailliez in profile looking down from one corner to a vivid rolling wave in more blue. With study the wave moves or seems to, hues in layers of of blue emphasize the winsome Tailliez.

Lydia Peelle is an American fiction writer. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" Honoree

Dear Laurent,

The sadness that I feel on learning of Andre’s death is tempered by the gratitude that I had the great fortune to discover him and his work in time to meet him in this life. Thank you, Laurent, for connecting me. The love and respect underlying your friendship with him is evident, and my heart is with you now that he has left us.

In the few short years since I learned of him, Andre’s art and his remarkable adventure of a life have inspired me in profound ways, both in my own art and in my own life. In fact, I struggle to find the words to capture what he means to me. I take solace in the fact that this feeling, like all the greatest and most complex, ultimately transcends words, anyhow.  

Words failed me when I met him, on that lovely May evening of the exposition in Bordeaux. Dizzy with the beauty of the room, and in awe to be finally face to face with this genius of a man, I became tongue-tied in my elementary French. Looking into Andre’s kind and brilliant brown eyes, I was suddenly unable to express all I wanted to say about what his work has done for me; or, more precisely, anything at all. But looking back on it now, the one thing I could manage to say to Andre that evening was perhaps the purest essence of the multitudes I desired to communicate.

“Je vous aime" I said to him that evening, over and over. “Je vous aime”

"Je vous aime" My understanding of French is enough to know that this is something of a contradictory statement: one cannot love a stranger. It is a paradox, a statement both impossible and true. But what are Andre’s works if not exquisite paradoxes, both impossible and true. A painting created deep under the ocean? Unimaginable! Yet, there it is: incredibly, it exists.

As I write this, one of his paintings is in front of me. As always, it is alive and breathing, in a state of constant change. Every time I look at it, it is a new painting. Like the sea it depicts, it serves as an exquisite symbol for all that is both constant and fleeting. Which is to say: life itself. 

For me, Andre’s undersea work also serves as an apt metaphor for all great art. Because a true artist, at no small risk, must always dive deep; she must disappear into the depths of both the physical and psychic realms. If she is attentive, prepared, and lucky, she will find a way to express what she discovers there. And if and when she resurfaces, bringing with her to dry land the work she created, it will capture, for those who experience it, something of the beautiful mystery of the place to which she descended.