Heciya was to be a painting-itinerary through Joni Mitchell's albums.
Of course, it was impossible to mention them all, and in all cases I did not want that painting to become a sort of accounting catalogue of all these albums’ markers. Therefore, I simply expressed some of their symbols, out of a selection of my own favourite Joni Mitchell’s records -obviously.

In reference to the art of painting, I meant to express with that painting an homage to the painter Joni Mitchell. Therefore, I designed the shawl worn by the Canadian artist in Heciya with a seedling of flamboyantly colored flowers evoking those of Giorgia O'Keefe, who once declared: "I paint because the colour is significant”. Why Giorgia O'Keefe? Because in 1977, the painter and musician from Saskatchewan visited the painter from the desert of New Mexico (of whom the author of Hejira subsequently painted a portrait), in a burst of communion and sharing that allowed the two women to exchange their respective visions on art and painting. And of course, I sowed some irises by Van Gogh on this stole, because making a painting about Joni Mitchell without mentioning Van Gogh was purely inconceivable.

Hejira was the road that led Joni Mitchell into an honourable and dignified escape, a survivor from the crash of her shattered love of then. The route in my painting had to be a symbol of all the directions that one takes in one’s life, that of the accomplished journey, and that of what is yet to come. Thus the route in Heciya was to evoke also the days after. And this after -including our times now-, was then to show the antithesis of the Hejira’s white and frozen landscape:  it should show the bright colours of the recovery against adversity, some river shimmering like hope, in opposition of a sleeping frozen lake’s whiteness : it had to evoke the flamboyance of Joni Mitchell today. Having researched a title for that work echoing the "Hejira" term, by studying different options in the Lakota vocabulary, I finally chose Heciya — “HayCheeYah” — Direction (of this, or of that).
With Joni Mitchell’s Œuvre in mind as a sentinel of her journey, and her lifetime’s voyage against the backdrop, I was thus able to name that road, which comes from a given point and goes in the direction of some other places yet to be explored.

This Lakota term is one of the reasons why the Indian blanket that Joni Mitchell wore on the cover of her Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm album appears in Heciya. A milestone for me, since that album was the one that the musician recorded in the United Kingdom during our second meeting near Bath in 1987 – for me, a magnificent meeting, as the first one in Paris in 1983 had been. But if I retained this Indian blanket, it is also as a reminder of Joni Mitchell's total and unconditional commitment to the cause of the North American Native Indians, and in particular that of the Lakotas. A commitment immortalized by the Lakota composition in Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm (which inspired me for an engraving, in 1988-1989).

The inhabitants of a continent to whom the new conquerors from the East, through the fire of arms and the blood spilled, made clear that they no longer had anything to do there.
These natives of the plains and mountains of America, these lands' legitimate owners whom their new masters parked in reserves, forcing the dispossessed ones to deny their gods and revoke their beliefs, breaking the ancestral link they shared with Mother Nature as a consequence.

But when the church got through
They traded their beads for bottles
Smashed on Railway Avenue
And they cut off their braids
And lost some link with nature.

A link forever gone to the benefit of skyscrapers, shopping malls, oil wells, highways, concrete parking lots and Big yellow taxis. Resulting in our nightmarish times, shattered by the disruptions of the Earth, there before our eyes, everywhere. A tragic chronicle of some predicted disaster, written every day with the bitter ink of devastation on a page which once shone with the colours of an earthly paradise but which is now ransacked, torn apart and soiled. A page that the outraged Nature brandishes us today, by presenting us with a bill that we are incapable of paying.

Like Joni Mitchell, we should have listened to the Lakotas a little more.