From 1977 to 1982, a sorrowful personal relationship inspired me a series of paintings on cardboard, all of which echoing some of Joni Mitchell's compositions. In 1978, challenged by the correspondences between my own experience and Joni Mitchell’s music and words, I decided to work in a more structured way and I selected some compositions out of the corpus of Joni Mitchell's albums published at that time –eg from Song To A Seagull to Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Thus the Songs by Joni Mitchell Collection took shape in a boxset of eleven works identical in format, that I had the honour to present to Joni Mitchell in 1983. Some of these works continued to refer to personal situations encountered by then, such as the Edith & The Kingpin gouache with the figuration of John Reid. John in those days was Elton John's manager, and I had known him in the context of my work inspired by the British singer in 1974. Joni Mitchell's “Kingpin” evoked some kind of powerful mogul with a long arm, whose company could be as cool and exciting as sometimes tough and stormy ("His crimes and his Glories", namely).
Mitchell’s portraiture touched me, because sounding irresistibly like the young Rock Business tycoon I had known then.

The Collection corpus was followed by a diptych directly inspired by the Cactus Tree composition, a body of work that escaped the former Collection’s rules in terms of size, and which was the last work to find its roots in my own failed love story. Then after my first 1983 meeting with Joni Mitchell, my interpretation of her texts and music gradually took me away from my personal background, favoring paintings with a more fictional approach.