The mixed-media painter and sculpteur Emilie Chaix will probably be surprised to learn that a chat with her nearly two years ago shook my verities, showing that my modest hopes for personal evolution were too modest and my own slowness to change has been a measure of nothing but myself.
My checkered career of silent desperation has of course been mostly lived by according most space in it to my knot of unplumbable personal fears.
The late Bob, the godless engineer-philosopher appointed to dress my infant nakedness in sturdy shoes, wool trousers and button-down shirts, once summed up, as only the Ohio-born can, what have become my views on the possibility of positive change, evolution and creativity. Theatrically wiping his brow, he caught my eye, asked for the crescent wrench and, with casual finality, remarked, “What of Happiness, Trace?” and went back to whatever dreary household task he had in hand.
Obviously, since then, mostly, filial piety oblige, I have been – meetings with mixed-media artists notwithstanding, and in the absence of a Messiah promulgating true low-fat ice-cream – very, very modest in my hopes for personal evolution and better, changed, states and skeptical, too. And, according to some, too damnably slow to change intolerable situations, too.
All the same, since Chaix succeeds both in expressing creativity as art and in living creatively (keeping in mind that I don’t think all creative expression is art and I do think we all should strive towards living creatively) these fixed views of mine require some revision.
As far as I can see, Chaix must be counted of the “Aquarians”, of those who, unlike myself, were born while Yahweh was adjusting his kippah and who then grew to adulthood while Dad was too concentrated on snaking out the toilet to notice the hopeful twittering in the peanut gallery.
Chaix and her work came to my attention because I saw two radically different sides to it in two widely separated places on the same day, while walking with Fifi, Karine’s sister and my dear friend. Fifi, for whom only steamed vegetables can maintain the steel-whip muscles that enclose her, who sleeps four hours a night and has apparently made an energy pact with the demonic powers, walked me in under 30 minutes – she was in heels – from the Porte de Champerret, where we met Chaix and her artistic production, to the top of Montmartre, where we encountered, quite by chance, in a shop
window, Chaix’s haute couture work.
Fifi thought I should look into it, so I did.
Chaix’s stand-alone art creations, like her former work on designer accessories, are composed in varied media – including wood, textile, bone, paint, collage – with a heavy use of textures – and featuring much textile. Her art uses mostly natural colorations, striking me, in person, as very much “sea-born…”
I want to say “primitive” – but “primitive” could be taken to imply the “naïve” or the “ritual-tribal” art borrowings used in luxury accessories. Chaix’s creative inspiration is, I think, rather, to look for the esthetic in our corporal interior. It’s an esthetic of “reptilian brain”, in the sense of “original” or “originating” forms and movements, rather than other, previously-developed, esthetics.
In a visit to Chaix’s workshop in Montreuil, an inner-ring city where many Paris artists now live and work – I asked her to tell me a little bit about how her evolution and change came about.
Like almost all French people, I understand, she began adult life by being winnowed out of an aspirational or vocational course of action by something academic and hopelessly competitive.
For her, Chaix says, the winnower took the form of a philosophy teacher who suspected her of wanting to be a journalist.
So, like most of us, she fell back on real experience and figured something out.
She first went to work at the Maison des écrivains et de la littérature, where she learned a proper distaste for indoor work at fixed hours. She was also lucky enough to learn early to avoid the exquisite pain of being under the thumb of a jerk.
Then, one day, Chaix tells me, her Grandmother taught her to embroider.
She never looked back. From that day, she began working with embroidery, soon becoming a market-recognized creator.
For over 10 years she made embroidery for the wedding dresses of the likes of Madonna as well as more than 500 jewelry pieces for the haute couture houses.
Then she started to feel she was running in place. She called time out although the jewelry job was more than paying the rent.
Trying to find what motivated her decision, Chaix generally down-played the inequalities involved in the employer-employee relation, where any artistic recognition redounds to the brand-marketer, not to the actual creator.
She points rather to upbringing, physical resistance and taste.
She says that, as a child living much among and with the creations of the legendary Niki de Saint Phalle, the former wife of her stepfather, she had come to take it for granted that a woman could live independently on her production, whatever that might be.
So, in her head, at least, whatever she might decide to do in terms of artistic creation seemed, d’emblée, legitimate.
And then, she says, there is real labor involved in sewing. As any ordinary seamstress can tell you, bending over a table and working with your brains and hands is trying; add production demands and deadlines and it’s a physical challenge.
However, Chaix says, when all is said and done, the sense of going nowhere is a greater spur to trying to go somewhere than anything else.
All things considered, Chaix, who keeps up her ties with haute couture, feels the change has worked out well enough.
Just discovering, for example, that it is important to create, à la Carl Rogers, a “personal-universal” space justifies the change. We are sitting face-to-face in her workshop. A casual wave of her hand invites me to look around me.
Chaix’s creations, as well as knickknacks and bric-à-brac, people the place.
She says that when she created this little personal-universal world for herself, she felt she was right. And feeling right in space and time is at the heart of creation and also at the heart of living.
It doesn’t matter, Chaix concludes, if this personal-universal world intersects in any way with the “shared” world: the personal will inevitably become universal and, as some aspiring American magnate or another has also said, creative endeavor is a question of working, working, working.
Better to please yourself, then, when all is said and done.
Images
1."Poursuite" , sculpture, H66 x L38 x P 12 cm (wood, textile), 2014.Chaix’s esthetic strikes me as “bio-genetic movement”, in the sense of “original” or “originating” forms and movements.
2. Less than an hour after admiring her artistic production at a contemporary art show at the Porte de Champerret, Fifi and I ran into Emilie Chaix’s striking designer work in a shop window on Montmartre, the “Hill of Martyrs”
3. "Danse macabre", sculpture, H 53 x l21 x P33 cm (wood, textile, bone, paint...), 2015 : Chaix’s stand-alone art creations, like her former work on designer accessories, are composed in varied media – including, as in this piece, wood, textile, bone, paint, collage – with a heavy use of textures – and featuring much textile
4. "A dormir debout", 30 x 40 cm (aquarelle, ink, collage), 2016. All things considered, Chaix, who keeps up her personal ties with haute couture, feels the change has worked out well enough.
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