For twenty years, "La Nuit des Galeries" (Night of the Galleries) has turned the cobblestone streets of Vieux-Québec, Petit-Champlain, Place-Royale and the Vieux-Port into a single open-air gallery for one weekend each September, doors open, artists at their easels, the whole quarter given over to art until well past dark. Beauchamp Galleries, whose storefronts along Rue Notre-Dame have anchored the event for years, welcomed Joseph Capicotto back for the Labor Day weekend from Spetember 4th - 5th. It is not his first invitation. Joseph has painted live at La Nuit des Galeries in 2017, in 2022, and again in 2023 for Beauchamp's own 50th-anniversary edition, a track record that meant this year's crowd included as many collectors returning to see him as visitors meeting his work for the first time.
Joseph worked the way he always does at these events: start to finish, in public, with no sketch to fall back on and no room to hide a decision. A blank canvas on the first evening became, knife stroke by knife stroke, a finished composition by the close of the second, and this time, the painting didn't wait for the last mark to find its home. Halfway through, a longtime collector stopped, watched, and simply couldn't leave without it; the piece sold before Joseph had set down his knife. It is the kind of moment live painting exists to produce, one that no amount of finished inventory on a gallery wall can quite replicate.
The crowd around the easel only grew from there. Word travels quickly along Petit-Champlain on a night like this, and by the second evening Joseph was painting for a room several rows deep, newcomers seeing his palette-knife technique up close for the first time, and regulars who return, year after year, simply to watch him work. Beauchamp's art consultants, who have represented Joseph's paintings for two decades, described the same warmth that greets him every time he comes back: genuine curiosity from first-time visitors, and something closer to homecoming from the collectors who already know his work.
The evening held two more quiet gestures beyond the easel. Joseph also put the finishing touches on a commissioned piece, completed on-site before it went home with the client! And for one longtime collector, he set the brush aside entirely to offer something rarer than a painting: an original poem, written for a client who has followed his work for years. Small moments, but the kind that explains why Beauchamp keeps inviting him back, and why Quebec City keeps showing up.