Ortaire de Coupigny was born in Normandy, France. After studying art in Cherbourg, he settled in the Brittany region where he lives near the sea with his wife and two children. He exhibited at the Royal Academy of London in 2008 and now has galleries showing his work in France, Holland, the UK and Switzerland. Ortaire uses intense pigments to create his unique painted fish before suspending them in paraffin and coating them with a transparent resin. Real sardine cans (made in his local area) are used to create an interesting dynamic between the industrial, mass-produced, everyday object and his hand-painted, unique and often humorous representations of the fish. Using his unusual technique, Ortaire aims to surprise and delight us with this unexpected marriage of the commercial and the artisan.