We know, however, that this is not the most important: is not the fact of painting above all a way of listening, a way of putting oneself on the passage of the manifold vibrations going through the cosmos and merging into the quiver of life?
Besides, the picture is the common creation of artist and beholder, as long as the vividness of attention is maintained. It is born anew every time one takes a "fresh" view at it, ( what can be called privileged moments) and I am fully convinced that one is a painter because of one's qualified perception - in the sens of an "interior perception" - far more than by the work itself ( especially work where the know- how is the main preoccupation)
Our contemporaries who are often far more familiar with things ( than we are) might judge my speech indecent ( We have just lived through a reversal of decency!) Introducing our painting, i could insist on colours we use, on the roughness or the flexibility of the surface, or the diversity of tools we use. Nothing is hidden : we use oil paint on canvas or Isorel according to our inspiration, but if the time spent on " concoctions" is reduced to a minimum, a practical solution is devised every time, through detours which escape us, so that it is not possible to describe a "technique "
To create a work of art is to create a world
Kandinsky ( Du Spirituel dans l'art)
At the beginning is COLOUR. It is to Colour we surrender,
trying to create in us a maximum availability in order
that, making its way throug our moods of the hour, it can
find its form once more. It concerns therefore a painting
in which colour is at the same time its own space, its
own language, creates its own actors...
But colour is so mingled with our life that such a description can be utterly false:not only do we paint daily, but every walk - with or without a camera -every reading, every emotion, is whetting our appetite, so much so that at the benning was probably EMOTION! Therefore we mean painting which listens in to interior life through colour - it is an invitation to eavesdrop...
Some people would speak of Informal art ( splashes, stokes etc...), it would not be true, for what concerns us is chaos which falls into place according to laws which are not only "cerebral" . One witnesses new landscapes which are not quite unknown: interior landscapes! Strangely enough, if we dive into ourselves, as near as possible to the source, we realise that the volcano, the cascade, the lake, the mountain or the stars live inside us, as do the forest or the desert and that the ocean deeps touch the doors of Heaven...
Such painting therefore has something to do with archetypes. It drops us a kind of MENTAL GEOGRAPHY which has some links with the geography of our planet taken within the universe. It belongs to the elementary. Although it cannot be described as directly figurative, no more can it be classified as abstract, that is why we speak of INTERIOR REPRESENTATIONS.
Let us be clear: if sometimes ressemblance to the real world can seem striking, " interior" it remains, because nothing is beforehand, every thing is expressed by the inside, emanating from desire, through colours, before which we strive to remain insignifiant...
Our love for nature is probably obvious (we look closely at grass, moss and barks and are inlove with the movement of water and clouds) Somehow we are striving te CONNECT WITH THE SECRET OF THINGS...
All we want is to share and make people SHARE OUR WONDER.
In the same way, Raymond is a weaver. In our workshop, where a painting leads to another painting as naturally as a gesture to another one, or a moment to the next, we live the same joyous immediacy. He could not do without weaving; for him painting and weaving are two complementary activities and he cannot imagnine one without the other. But with weaving everything becomes at the same time simpler and more complex!
The laws of weaving are defined since the beginning of the world: you have warp and you have weft. Raymond keeps to rudiments: a primitive frame of which the only luxury is a roller for lengthening the material, a fork for compressing the fairly thick and always natural wools. If sometimes he likes to play with cotton, it is because of its different kind of brightness morethan for experimenting with "matter". From there on, he secretes his webs with the same eagerness the spider secretes its own, as though it was second nature with him!
At the beginning was Colour...with, this time, a new element one must take into consideration: Time! Don't we say in French " le fil du temps", the thread of Time? It is very slow, minute work: several months are necessary for the growth of a tapestry. The roller puts behind it the work done the precedent days, but the threads of thought remains unruffled. Raymond does not use sketches and with each new tapestry a new era of the soul is revealed since these piled-up threads, knotted in the air, are also tye diagram of an exploration. Of one of the POSSIBLE PASSAGES TOWARDS ANOTHER LIGHT..
Celebration of the world through diligence, the designe emerges quietly from the depths of the days . When man has smashed time to smithereens, when he has savagely grappled with the verticality of trees opposite him, his tapestry frame rooted like a tree of life at the center of our house is the best symbol of our resistance.
This search for light, which marks our incarnation on this earth, is at one with our " personal legend ", so much so that it outshines all the rest and makes it impossible to relate our two joined lives in biographical mode. Who will ever at the same time tell of energy spent finding the correct distance, creating and protecting the silence of a workshop, where we press onwards against wind and tide?
Our curriculum vitae, serving usually for safe passage in society, is thus very slender and we appear somewhat as freaks in the eyes of our fellow creatures ( of our parents, even) - whereas for others, more respectful, we are like angels, subsisting on air. Consequently we are revolving in a vicious circle: on the poverty line in a world where only money counts, doomed to a precarious state, exiled inside the country where we were born, etc...
Let's waste no time in explanations: the place of art ( of the artist therefore, especially the living artist!) in our society is now clear for all with general consent - beware, moreover, if you are self-taught- Honni soit any"supplement of soul"!
Two lives for nothing? Nobody the wiser! Guess what follows!
We are counting a little on Internet to avoid the trap. And we retire in our little house amid the fields where we pass through life with our books, our flowers and our pets. Suspended above the void of immense agriculturel grounds with our little botanical garden ( a very difficult survival too!), submerged by a sea of indifference but linked to the stars, oscillating between ravens and seagulls, between moon and sun!
We hope with all our heart to have sent a shaft of the light which carries us, if we will it so, for in fact there is no surer floor from us to the others. Even if, especially if, in the words of a great recluse,
"To see costs me seeing also what I would not see "
Antonio Porchia, Voices