A creation camp. I have often wondered what a creative camp means to me and to my colleagues. How do we relate to plein-air and the intention to capture things in the right light, to the easel, the canvases, and the dirty brushes carried through the valleys and over the hills? When you go to a creative camp, you leave your themes, sketches, and ways of doing things in the studio, you abandon the predictable and efficient comfort of the planned, step-by-step work.

You go on an apprehension journey, approach a new territory, and watch with a hunting dog's alert gaze the natural landscapes, architectural spaces, people and their relationship customs, and created, displayed, forgotten objects…endowed only with your own filters that help you perceive reality and the grid of general knowledge that you apply to the world, a fishing net with very small mesh that extract from what surrounds you a touch of meaning.

Imagine perceiving with increased alertness the shape of all things in the hope of finding something that will catch your eye or intrigue you as much as an unpredictable, unplanned treasure hunt. Long enough to make room for it among your panoply of subjects and themes, to dedicate your full attention for several hours, days, or weeks and to make you start carrying improvised easels and unknown solvent bottles after you. 

This is the type of adventure we’ve committed ourselves to when the art enthusiast Dorin Negrau invited and generously hosted us at the Traditional Center of Connection to the Simple Life. All this, in hopes that we will tell the story of all those beautiful things that were carefully created there in the last century and recovered afterward in order to be exhibited with much affection in the last decade. But also to tell our story, display our art and speak out about the overlap between these two different worlds that merge together as if they were in a balanced logical inference.