Interview filmed on June 9, 2023 at the apartment-studio of painter Claudie Floutier in Besançon, France. Cameras Lionel Georges. Read video transcripts.

I met my friend Claudie Floutier in September 1979, as soon as I entered the Besançon Fines Art school, after a short year studying architecture in Strasbourg. I had decided to leave the study of architecture, which seemed to require too much 'reason' and material restrictions, being too 'rational' in somehow. But in Claudie's first class, she took us into previously unanticipated, marvellous and distant worlds. In particular: COLOR or COLORS, for which I've since developed an immoderate love and fascination. Colorful, spicy, teeming, sensual and marvelous Worlds... that I was later able to encounter in person on my travels to Egypt, Mexico and Guatemala. The revelation I experienced in the Egyptian temples was so powerful that, on my return from Egypt, I decided to quit the school altogether: for Art is not to be found in schools or museums, but in Life and all that goes with it: rituals, bewitchments and, above all, the SACRED! 
Since her first initiation course, we've remained friends, and we often exchange views on Art, Literature and the state of the World in general. Her latest outburst was last week, when passing through the Gare de Lyon train Station in Paris, to visit her daughter Millie and babysit her grandchildrens, she saw some new luxury boutiques, including one selling coffee capsules! What an absurd and superfluous idea, at a time when the world is overflowing with waste, to sell such polluting and useless products! Who really needs coffee capsules? And What else? 
In September 2019, we had already filmed a first interview: Art, Wisdoms & Snippets of Shared Memories, in which we talked mainly about my work. It seemed important for me to interview, or rather to let the artist Claudie speak, in her apartment-workshop, her colorful and germinative UNIVERSE, so that she could present us, let us appreciate, fill us with wonders with a small part of her works and series of works, on paper, for the most part, piled up in shoebox cartons, innumerable and prolific. Like the Trobeïrices, Corona-virées, Rembrandt portraits etc., etc. series. And also to tell us a little about her life, so rich in encounters, and the whys and wherefores, with no desire to explain neither justify herself, her life choices as a Woman and as an Artist. In her work, there's a will to do, to turn the table upside down, to bear witness to the injustices of the World, but above all, there's the strength of a presence and attention to it, and to lift the veil of cruelty, injustice and upheaval of our modern life. To pluck out and extract a beauty, often ephemeral, sometimes fragile, always simplistic, irreverent, rolling in the hay and clownish, according to her will ; as she says about herself, she is "John who laughs and John who cries". I hope her beautiful artistic univers will move deeply all of you, far beyond this simple documentary film, the conventions of Art, its normative mundanities and today's right-thinking. « Long live to Claudie! »


In the words of the artist:
My mother's lineage is from the Cévennes, my father's from the Camargue... I was born in Meynes, near the Pont du Gard, in the shadow of which I return every summer to my beautiful old house in Fournés.
 The rest of the year, by choice, I live in Besançon... I love this singular town, its river, its hills and all the nature that makes me who I am... I was a teacher at the School of Fine Arts here, after having taught at the School of Fine Arts in Metz... where I competed with reluctance after a very difficult life as an artist in Paris... Where I was a student at the School of Fine Arts, in Lucien Couteau's studio.
 Earning a living as a color demonstrator at Lefranc Bourgeois, based in Puteaux, I was easily accepted at the School of Fine Arts in Metz, where I was scorned at the time by the Parisian art world...
 Married, divorced, then a single mother, very attached to my work at the Besançon School of Fine Arts, very attached to my daughter Millie, I continued to live where I was, picking up scraps of time to find myself and create whatever came into my head without worrying about artistic performance... Me, me, just me and my enchanted little universe... My faithful and fictitious companion Trobeirice accompanies me and takes me on adventures I never imagined... right next to the kitchen... from which rises a smell of burning... So, having reached this age when the art of being a grandmother is cultivated, I continue to clear this little path that comes and goes, climbs and meanders through the hours... and... that leads me... I don't know where... 

Claudie Floutier, June 10, 2023