"Every moment is a window on all time." Thomas Wolfe
As I prepare for my next artist in residence experience, I can't help but put it into the context of my time at Orquevaux. One of my fellow artists was convinced that the château had called to us, the twenty-two of us there at the time, this specific group, to come together for a purpose. We were not there just to make art, or as Tim Carpenter says "make aesthetic objects". We were painters, writers, actors, musicians, collagists, photographers. We had different views of art, and the world in which we made art. On the street or in a gallery we might not have recognized that element of each of our lives, each of our interpretations of art, that makes us alike. And we would miss out, we would lose something of value.
"The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world." Henry David Thoreau
But there in the château we were together, we were inseparable for that period of time. We were open to each other's art, and thus to each other. We saw not the things that make us different, but the things that make us alike, the things that drew us together. There was nothing there except art, and it was enough. Because of this landscape in a tiny valley in the Champagne region, in a tiny village that most people of never heard of; because of this château, rescued from obscurity and opened to our dreams and our visions; because we were all drawn to this place, together, at that moment in time, it became not about each of ourselves, but about what each of us had to offer the others.
"Humility in the face of the actual and of unrelenting time, the absolute thusness of all that is not the self." Tim Carpenter
To the painters who are poets, to the writers who are humanists, to the musicians who speak with something other than words; to the actors who reach into your soul and extract a piece of you that has been forgotten or ignored, to the collagists is make whole the torn and broken pieces, and to the graffitists who shout when others are only whispering, I thank you. And I thank the château for calling out to me, and for bringing us all together. Because now I know that what I have to say is something of value.
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