One day, at the end of an autumn marked by an abundance of icy rains, Martine Delvaux meets a film producer in a Montreal restaurant. Seduced by his novel Thelma, Louise and me (Héliotrope, 2018), he asked her to write the script for a film about the romantic relationship between the painters Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle.
“Then he adds, as if he had read my thoughts, as if he had understood that I needed something more than a (heterosexual) love story between two (rich and white) monsters of the history of painting: there was someone else, too… A young painter. […] It is said that it is because of her that their great love story ended,” writes the author in It could have been a movie. His name: Hollis Jeffcoat.
From then on, the writer’s heart and head began to vibrate. Martine Delvaux searches the archives, goes through biographies, exhibition catalogues, memoirs, stories and articles, meets witnesses in the hope of recovering every bit of information on the painter, often relegated to the role of friend, lover, or worse, dog sitter.
From these scattered fragments, the novelist breathes a soul, a trajectory into the one who, remaining in the shadow of two giants, nevertheless aroused the passion of Mitchell like that of Riopelle, when she only wanted one thing : dedicate yourself to your painting.
It is in this love of art that the paths of Martine Delvaux and Hollis Jeffcoat cross, their respective passions constantly relegated to the margins of the feminine, their courage constantly shaken by the performances demanded of the women whose names appear in the Big story.
Through fiction, the author lets herself be penetrated by the details, the links, the words to fill in the gaps, the vacant spaces of the story, and thus give form to what does not exist. To carry out her investigation, she uses a process used many times in her previous works.
To read Martine Delvaux is to witness writing in progress, the construction and movements of a thought. Everything is there: emotions, doubts, impulses, questioned, dissected, intellectualized in a back and forth that is as cerebral as it is sensory.
If repetition may seem annoying at first reading, it proves to be an essential refining tool in this quest whose conclusion remains unresolved, a way of accentuating the introspective value of obsession. Like the artist who takes a step back to analyze his painting and come back to it better, the writer constantly retraces her steps to follow in the footsteps of the abstractionists and thus, in the words of Joan Mitchell, “eliminate the clichés, remove everything that is excess”, and achieve, as much as possible, a form of accuracy.