Back in WINTER

I am back at the farm in the North east of France, on a type of quest to understand something about this place, my relationship with it. A sense of curiosity is drawing me back to a old house, holding many personal memories in objects left here, some imprints of my lineage, and a land with a much longer history.
We have never lived here, it is an inherited low value yet symbolic and emotionnally charged secondary place. Our last foot dans les Vosges. As the winters here are softer than they used to, it is livable at this time of the year, as long as I keep the fire burning in the chimney, embrace lots of layers of clothes and minimum material comfort.
There is something familiar for me here, a sensation of home for someone who have been living for almost 20 years the opposite of the world. Familiar doesn’t necessarily mean confortable, often quite the opposite.
What does « entretenir » a place means: holding in between, or holding each other, in an etymologic sense.
The urge to escape and get rid of the house seems a bit softer, despite many practical reasons and psychological tensions. I sit in between. And for now I draw. The outside and land is what I want to engage with.

Here is a selection of ink drawings I have just made in response to the place.

It started with a tree

I came back to France end of August after packing the past 10 years of my life in Australia. I followed an impulse leading me to the north-east of France in a family farm close to Epinal, the city I was born in. The last time I visited this house I was taken by two main feelings. The first one was a strong desire to shift things in a place where objects and memories seemed motionless, almost trapped. This house was actually given to me 10 years ago. I felt like the inheritant of a story that needed a new direction. My second response manifested as a type of inspiration to create something there. It seemed obvious to me I had something to live and do there.

Getting into a creative process was not an easy ride when I arrived. I first felt a kind of pressure to make a move and put the house for sale. It seemed it was my task to close this family chapter. Coming to that decision was painful, my tears seemed to process things that were beyond (and probably pre) my own story.

In August and September I dived into boxes of past objects and documents, those of my deceased brother and father and and my own as lots of life have been kept there. The emotions were quite intense and I couldn’t enter any process of recording the experience. It was deep, personal and at that time not of the domain of explicit worldly language.

I therefore engaged in drawing and painting, when I could. I was after a physical expression of my relationship to this place and time, not aiming for anything in particular, letting creative impulse lead the way.

It all started with a tree, my father planted years ago.

Process photograph , Jarmenil, 14 Septembre 2023

It started with a tree (2/suite)

What if trees could talk?

I spent a long time looking at trees at the back of the farm, in between reading personal letters I wrote and received when I was a teenager and a young adult, in a world where email were not invented yet.

What if trees could talk? I choose three trees and started drawing them on little cards used by my father decades ago, kept in a metal box.

This process lead me to draw with trees and their sape, in a frottage technique. The weather in Les Vosges is quite often grey and rainy. When the trees are wet they leave yellow marks, their sape start talking. I developed a series of works, imprinting trees marks on clear gesso.

Trees share their colours when it rains.

Process photograph , Jarmenil, 19 October 2023