Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927)

‘Long ago I elaborated a vocabulary made of images. I drew from things laid out on my table next to the paper and the ink bottle — exceedingly humble things (if you will forgive the pathetic fallacy, of attributing an attitude such as modesty to pebbles, roots and orange peels). And then, emerging from them, like sequences of free associations or like puns, I saw all my lady-loves appear, and also the feathered headgear of the Gilles dancers of the Carnaval de Binche… and volcanic eruptions, spirals, volutes, the meanders of a river turning into a lane, a shoelace, a necessary snake.’ —P. ALECHINSKY