LIBERTÉ (2)

(Version française dans le précédent article)

Today's post will follow a somewhat different shape from what I usually do. Because the events I have to share are all important to me and are tied up under one and only theme : freedom.

Meaning of freedom is quite a wide concept and may gather at the same time independance, lightness, self-awareness, emancipation, but most of all choice. Having the choice to live one's life the way one intends it to be.

 Almost a year ago, I was signing my first publishing contract for a children book project. This project, if you've browsed this blog, you know about it. Indeed, during the children book exhibition in Montreuil last year, I met a publisher who was interested in my end of studies album, my reinterpretation of Beauty and the Beast. And it happened that I would then have to continue the work in order for the book to be publishable, which means that I had to produce quite a number of furthermore illustrations.
I had a very hard time with this project, for several reasons.

Seven months passed by in between the end of my studies and the meeting with this publisher. During that period of time, I worked on my drawing, I've been aiming at making it evolve. I started developing other projects that were really tempting me, I've been aiming at finding my own identity outside school. And this identity, it was NOT my end of studies project. Besides, the perspective of diving back into something that was definitively over in my mind had made me reluctant. Erasing for one moment everything I had started to build and going back to this old style that wasn't looking like me that much afterall.

 Likewise, when I had evaluated the amount of work it would require, I had realized that the next four following months of my life, at least, were about to be dedicated to this project and that I wouldn't have the possibility to move on with something else. Of course, this is what an illustrator's work is about and normally I would have been pleased, but this statement associated with my first point dived me into a long and tiring adventure, where my personal evolution has been on standby.
So today, this is with an intense feeling of lightness that I announce you that my work on this project is now OVER. On this Friday, January 9th of 2015, I returned the set of works I had started to do research into in June. The intensity of these last four months finds at last its balance and here I am, relieved from my school past.
I then hope that all of my energy will find echo with readers and that the pleasure to see my first album in bookshops will erase the difficulties I met during its creation :)

Here goes my first feeling of freedom. A huge weight lifing up and most of all, the possibility of moving on, of exploring, of chosing the path I want to follow.

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I will keep myself evasive on the following point as it is very personal, but I still wanted to include it in this post since it completely matches the theme.
Since the end of my studies, I have needed to feel myself evolve, to commit to a new adventure that is maturity and responsability. Not everything went the way I would have hoped and little by little, I kind of implanted deeper and deeper roots, feeling like paralyzed and blocked in a space-time, witness of the world's evolution around me and without me.

A little more than a month ago, a buried thought that I had judged unreachable got back to the surface. And I then took a decision that will change quite a lot of things in my life to come. I simply realized my huge need for a new air, to carry out a demarcation between what is my teenager/student life and what is to become my adult life.
As soon as I set this finality, my prison started to fade out. I now have an aim, a personal achievement to reach. And even if I know that my fears will still be there on the way leading me to it, my freedom lies on the idea of feeling understood and supported and most of all on the idea of now knowing where I am going to.
And in order to prepare this new air, I will already allow myself a few holidays in two weeks, calmly, in the city of Annecy, that I can't wait to discover :)

Here goes my second feeling of freedom, the one of now having a goal that I've decided on and that will, I know it, allow me to escape and to open up.

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At last, I wanted to share a few lines considering the events that happened in France two weeks ago. French and non-French, as you probably know, there was an attack on the 7th of January 2015 within the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo's office.

Beyond the unexplained and unbalanced violence of this act, what touched me the most is the lack of tolerance. The fact of not accepting that a person thinks differently than oneself and expresses it. To attack with weapons people who never defended themselves but with a pencil is, besides, overweening and coward. That we agree or that we don't agree, the newspaper always displayed humor only, towards everybody, but never hate. And those people, under the pretext of beliefs, still violated their principles by encouraging violence. Which makes me believe that terrorism has no religion. It cannot be otherwise. It is only an unstable pretext to hate. There was here a lack of respect towards a religious community but also a lack of respect towards a laic country, which has at the same time no religion, yet embraces them all.
Onto a humoristic note, but still quite serious to me, I share a quote from the character of Yoda in Star Wars : "Fear leads to anger ; anger leads to hate ; hate leads to suffering." Yes, fear can lead to hate and it is hard to resist to that feeling, but succumbing to it would be agreeing that they are right.

Here goes my third and last feeling of freedom. The one that should characterize all peoples. The one that allows to express ourselves, as much as possible with tolerance and with some kind of open-mindedness, and then driving away a collective suffering.