Anywhow, after chatting with Joni Mitchell for a few minutes, I returned to my car for picking up all the post-1983 paintings and prints I had brought with me. Doing so took me a while, given the number of works and the large format of some, obliging me to make several back and forth. Once everything was gathered, Joni Mitchell helped me arrange them around the room. Again, I spent more or less four hours with the musician, talking about painting, showing her everything I had made since our first meeting, and discovering her own new works that she was working on while recording her new album. Most of them were abstract research, cousins of some of the compositions she had created at the time of the Mingus album; then for Dog Eat Dog -that is at least what I remember, if I am correct.
Because I can only rely on my memory while revisiting the anecdotes that marked these moments spent with Joni Mitchell. During our two meetings, not once did I have the reflex to take any photos ... If I abstained, it was mainly out of respect for Joni Mitchell, because I meant to avoid affecting the quality of these metings, by muddying their meaning. I didn't want to annoy her with a basic fan's attitude or that of some autograph hunter -whom I wasn't. But this lack of photographic testimony also makes me measure the dizzying gap that separates decades prior 2000 from present times. Now, we spend our lives documenting anything and everything with our smartphones -including disposable, ugly, useless and mundane things. Conversely, the immaterial souvenir that I keep in my mind and my heart of these extraordinary moments with Joni Mitchell is well worth all the photos that were not taken. Because the colours of the latter fade over time, while those of memories perdure and never die.
At some point of the evening, Joni Mitchell took out an entire series of smeared paint bottles, which I identified as being works of their own. Handicapped by my English as usual, I tried to look smart, pretending to understand something that looked a bit weird to me though. Fortunately, after a while, Joni Mitchell took pity on me, realizing that I did not understand what she was