A Painter's single path, as each painter has his own proper path.

The first path I crossed during my teen years and which marked me deeply is coming from a hearted man, a champion of the Flanders' land, Abel Leblanc.

He used to be my art teacher. This artist who never relinguished to passing fashions has always known how to follow his lighted path. I owe to him the amazement I feel in front of nature.

I also had the luck of having his wife as my french teacher. She made me discover Colette and I have kept in mind the following few verses :

Bord de bassin "Salon des indépendants 1986"

The sun walked on the sand

A breathe of ice with the smell of hail comes from the purple east

Your unbridled peony fills the fireplace with a spread continuously flowering again

A few years ago, this path brought me in this area where Colette lived with Henry de Jouvenel in the Varetz castle for sometime. Is it pure luck ?

I am from the Berry area and by following its country paths I discovered Alain Fournier and the Grand Meaulnes, his well known character. The ways Meaulnes was following

across Sologne and Berry, looking for happiness, I am also continuously searching a kind of happiness called color and light.

I lived in a family where music was always with us. Debussy, Ravel, Satie are for me ways where each and every note fell from the sky like colored dashes.

Van Gogh was my first path in painting, I was drawn by his tortured ways where the light is bursting like burning flashes. I went all over the places he had painted, searching for the paths he followed : Auvers sur Oise near Paris, Groot-Zender in the Netherland, Arles Amsterdam, Paris....But it is the impressionist paths of Monet, Sisley, Pissaro and their predecessors like Constable and Daubigny which more deeply impressed my painter's path. Like them, I enjoy installing my easel in front of a landscape where the continuously changing light leads me to find a thousand of different colors. Each painting is a confrontation with nature, God made it and I am just modestly trying to reproduce what he did. Very often filled with notes, colors and words, I need my brushes to express all the richnesses I gathered along my painter's path. I have been drawn to teaching drawing and painting to children and adults; It has been for me an other way of discovering. Teaching is also a way of self-discovery through others.

After living for many years in the North of France, my path brought me in Corréze, where I have put down my new roots. There I discovered sheer beauty, the quietness and the changing colors of its wooden landscapes : springs as fresh as children's faces, warm summers where the greenery turns to reddish-brown, falls, golden and sepia-colored full of softness, and Prussian-blue winters sometimes turning to silent white.

Come to discover as I have done "The Green Country". Maybe you will find back its charm in my paintings.

I wish you a lot of happiness in colors and whispers and to take the opportunity to visit Colette's Gardens in Varetz.

Raymond Weytens