Connections/Country

My name is Valerie Faivre. I'm a paper conservator, and my topic is country.

I grew up in the east of France in a very small village, at the time was less than three hundred people, with no store in town.

My grandparents had a garden that would sustain their needs for the entire winter.

I feel strongly rooted to my region. I know the land and I know the people.

Gustave Courbet was the leader of the Realists in the late nineteenth century. Courbet is close to my heart, because he's our regional painter. He always returned to his native town, despite his growing fame and all the activities that he had in Paris.

I look at his landscape and it's almost like my senses are awakening. I smell the forest and I hear the sound of the snow under my footstep and

I watch the glistening trout in that gushing water. My grandfather, one of his great passions

was the garden and the orchard. I looked at this painting thinking, maybe he could have left this rake there on the tree.

Millet was a peasant and he was a painter. He just depicted his surrounding like it was. Animals and figures almost melt with the landscape.

These paintings, they have a road through them. They have a path that for me sometimes are a path to

imaginary journey. It could be a path through the field, or a

clearing through the woods. There's always somewhere to go, somewhere to travel.

The American way of looking at landscape is completely different. The scale of the country is different, so we have big, wide, open spaces.

And I think the emphasis in the French landscape is on the detail.

I came to become a paper conservator through my love for drawings. The media of drawings, like watercolor, pastel

ink, graphite pencils and many more, convey the changing aspect of the outdoors a lot better than any other medium.

Some of these drawings are almost photographic views of what once existed.

My husband is American, and he's from Philadelphia, so we are world apart. And I have a son, who's growing up in New York, he was born here.

I try to take him, whenever possible, when we go to France, you know, in the outdoors, so he has this in him.

I have an acute sensitivity for changes in nature, especially when unspoiled sites are being destroyed.

I get angry when I see more and more modern constructions taking over the land. I think that if Cézanne had to paint this site again it would be a very different one.

There's a lot of debate in France about harmonizing the new with the old, but I believe that interest lies in preserving historical urban sites and beautiful villages more than

the country at large. Rural historical landscape and cultivated land nobody really cares about.

Maybe my grandparents, their generation, might have been the last one to be

small farmers.