Encres & Terres Noires

French artist Paule Riché lives in the black clay hills of the Hautes Alpes where she paints large mural sized triptychs using techniques based on ancient oriental landscape painters.

Le poème est une peinture invisible. La peinture est un poème visible. Guo Xi

It is said that before committing brush to paper, Taoist monks sit in meditation for years, contemplating each brush. The work of those 9th century monks and an interest in Oriental and Buddhist philosophies influenced the painting of a young French artist Paule Riché, a student at Paris’ prestigious École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux Arts in 1985.

Ten years later, in 1996, Paule Riché, left her position as art professor for the Paris school board, rolled up her brushes, papers and paints, gathered up her new family, and moved to the Hautes Alpes region of France to fulfill a childhood dream of living close to the land, a land that inspired her for the past decade.

The Chinese word for landscape, shanshui, translates as "mountains and water"; the downward flowing water and the upward thrusting mountains represent yin and yang, the two basic forces underlying the structure of the world. Taoists saw the natural landscape as a sacred, welcoming place and believed that sacred mountains are filled with supernatural energy connecting heaven and earth.

Riché begins her mural size oeuvres on the floor; moving as a dancer lightly balanced above the stage. One moment Riché is scraping a wide swath across her paper canvas with a broad bamboo brush and the next deftly outlining the contour that reveals the silhouette of an ancient mountain. She swipes the unfurled rice paper with bulbous horse hair brushes, mixing varying amounts of water with soluble pigment to make opaque or translucent blacks and grays. Then waving a feather duster dipped in a large tray of ink, she deftly caresses the paper, like a breeze blown across a stilled lake, the ink lightly touching down, barely leaving traces of its passing.

The black Chinese ink soaks into the moistened rice paper, curls and spreads, wrapping itself around the fibers of the paper. At times the ink is absorbed, at others it flows thick like oil. Riché’s hand, paper and ink unearth the sacred landscapes shrouded by the rice paper, revealing mountains, sky, rivers and all the contours and fissures of the earth.

After mounting the inked paintings to the wall, Riché prowls like a sacred mountain tigress; she reflects; watches; waits; closes her eyes to the painting; reflects again; steps up with her multi-coloured palette; then recoils; reflects once more until finally approaching the painting. As if applying make-up to the earth’s formations, Riché smears a small patch of gold leaf with her thumb; her fingers and the palm of her hand massage traces of pigment into the paper, light falls across the distant hills and slips through the mists.

A single stroke of the brush can create a masterpiece, but one has to know exactly where the stroke is needed. Riché’s elegant brushwork and deeply saturated colours against a ubiquitous black and white background produce a quiet, yet splendidly patterned and decorative effect that recalls the origins of classical Japanese Kano paintings.

Through patient and silent communication with her work, Riché waits for the paper to tell where rivers run, where mountains reach high, where clouds shroud a forest and where seas rise up in tempest. There is no urgency, nor a sense of instantaneous inspiration, but rather a duality of stillness and anticipation; a form of painting meditation which seeks out the secrets of nature’s wisdom.

If the Tao can be translated as the way, the path that is the void out of which all reality may be discovered, then the art of Paule Riché flows along that path. This is the story that follows the creation of a mural sized triptych by one woman, a painter, a mother, and a spouse, who made the choice to follow her muse and fulfill her dream. And while life in a small village away from the gilded lights of Paris has its draw-backs, Paule Riché chooses to pursue the sacred while balancing the challenges of raising her family and pursuing her painting surrounded by the black clay hills of the Terres Noires.

Photography & Story by Duane Prentice