I first encountered the music of Joni Mitchell in 1976, while I was taking classes at the Art School Met de Penninghen & Jacques d'Andon in Paris. It was this encounter that made me become a painter. In effect, it is the pictorial research that I undertook between 1977 and 1989, inspired by some lyrics and music of Joni Mitchell that I had selected, that led me to painting.

I had befriended with a lively, witty and beautiful student who was always sophisticated in her tastes and choices. Agnès d’Andon had me listen to Court and Spark, in 1976 (Agnes pursued since then her artistic path beautifully). Due to the role she played in my personal life at that time on the one hand, and the fact that she had opened the doors to Joni Mitchell's work for me on the other hand, I painted a portrait of Agnes in 1978 à la manière de one of the iconic photos of Joni Mitchell by the great American photographer Norman Seeff, an oil that I made for the Jericho composition from the Don Juan's Reckless Daughter album. This painting paid homage to Joni Mitchell as well as to Agnès, because of the latter's role in my introduction to the Canadian's music.
Fate decided that this artistic thunderbolt would be inextricably linked to another one, of a less happy nature. It is not exhibitionism that makes me bring up this episode. I mention this very personal story only in respect of the work that was produced then, and because it should be made clear that beyond the artistic qualities of Joni Mitchell's work, it is the connection between my own experience and the range of themes that she favored then (love and its failures' resulting hopelessness) that engaged me into making images inspired by her work. The "confessional" aspect (wrongly labeled as such by critics at the time) of Joni Mitchell’s art thus comforted me, and literally saved my life in the context of an impossible passion that had turned my life into hell between 1976 and 1982. Five years of ache -an eternity when one is only twenty years old. The time it took for this story to hatch, then to burn and finally to die out in the early Eighties.