Vive les Peintres-Graveurs! Yes, long live the Painter-Printmakers indeed, especially since the Society has recently assumed a Gallic aspect. It happened like this. My wife, Norma, and I stumbled across a shabby stone farm building in the Loire area nearly thirty years ago and bought it very cheaply. We restored it bit by bit, made friends with many of our neighbours and, since we both have fluent French, we soon became involved in many of the village events. But it wasn’t until about five years ago that we were introduced to Dominique Chrétien, an artist from an adjacent hamlet. In due course we were invited to visit his ‘studio’ – in effect, a scattering of barns and stables on farm-land that had belonged to his grandparents, all crammed with startlingly expressive paintings and sculptures of his own and with equally striking images by the groups of mentally handicapped young people who crowded regularly to his workshops. We were stunned by the impact of this wonderful creativity, all springing from the sheer dedication of a man with total belief in the healing power of engagement in art. In the spring of 2013 we were invited to Dominique’s house to meet the President of a group of artists to which our friend belongs. The group, we were told, was named ’49 Regards’ which, loosely translated, means ‘49 ways of looking’. ‘49’, incidentally, is the number of the Département of Maine-et-Loire of which Angers (home of our Plantagenet kings) is the chief city and the home of many of the French group. It soon transpired that the President was keen to know more about the RE of which I had spoken many times with Dominique and eventually, armed with a copy of the then recently-published Printmakers’ Secrets which I had lent to Dominique, he began to make admiring comments on the work of many of my colleagues and finally expressed the hope that I and any five other RE members might exhibit with ’49 Regards’ in the forthcoming autumn at their annual salon. This seemed to me to promise an interesting adventure so, with no idea how I would proceed to gather five willing colleagues, I agreed. In the event, assembling the team proved to be gratifyingly easy. In one
instance I bumped into a colleague at an exhibition and blurted out an invitation which was readily accepted. Another lived close and was therefore ready prey! I already had a bagful of framed work in my studio, due to be delivered to a third but six pieces of which were generously left for me to take to France. A couple of ‘phonecalls, two short drives, a rendezvous at Bankside, and the willing five were on board: Gerry Baptist, Jeremy Blighton, Peter Green, Sasa Marinkov and Hilary Paynter were the pioneers! The consignment of framed prints needed to be at Dominique’s by mid-September. The problem, though, was that I was by then undergoing a course of unforeseen hospital treatment every weekday. I couldn’t miss even one day, I was told; so Norma and I, with our precious cargo, took a night boat for Ouistraham on a Friday, arrived at our place by midday on Saturday and took the prints to Dominique that afternoon. Then came the first reward: on peeling back the bubble-wrap from two or three of the prints Dominique – usually the most reserved of men – yelled “Ah, je suis ravi!!”. We knew from his delight that the rushed journey had been worthwhile.