Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Raymond Warren
Article 72 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the April 11, 2007 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Breathing Life into Clay
To breathe life into a handful of clay is a delicate and mysterious process - one that ceramic sculptor Raymond Warren from Bois-Franc, north of Maniwaki, has been perfecting for over thirty years.
He began as a child, growing up near St Urbain and Sherbrooke in Montreal, when at the age of four he went by chance to l'École des Beaux-Arts with his older sister who was taking classes there. Huge bins of clay were available to the students. He dug in, discovering a delight in playing with clay that has never left him.
Soon he was taking Saturday morning classes himself, painting and drawing and building with wood. But always he would return to the feel of that dark, heavy, moist lump of grey earth in his hands.
A classic education at a Jesuit College with its emphasis on Philosophy and Logic did not dissuade him. He graduated early and decided to study for a year at l'École des Beaux-Arts before taking up a position in Maniwaki in 1969, teaching French as a Second Language. Two years later he was back in Montreal to secure a Visual Arts degree at the Universite du Québec (BFA, 1974) which, with his teacher's certificate, allowed him to return to Maniwaki as an art teacher.
"Living in Maniwaki proved to be a great freedom for me as a young artist. I wanted to do figurative sculpture at a time vvhen the current emphasis was on modular work - organizing geometric forms - it was all very abstract and intellectual. In the country people know what speaks to them. They may not have the language for it but they have the judgment. I wanted to be able to share my work with my neighbours and students, whereas in Montreal I would have had to convince my fellow artists."
Raymond began with the practical pursuit of pottery - throwing pots and firing them in a gas kiln at his home studio. His initial figurative sculptures caught the mood of the times in political statements of suffering Man, rending his chest in an alienated world not to his liking. Between his teaching commitments and pottery, Raymond found little time left for fun.
By the 1980s Raymond had discovered another way to envision the world. A trip to France on a Franco-Quebec exchange introduced him to the wood-fired figurative work coming out of La Borne, an area with rich deposits of natural clay. The clay drew artists from miles around. The effects of the flames, the smoke, the ash from wood-fire kilns, coupled with the heartwarming local tradition of nestling small clay figures on top of village houses, confirmed Raymond in his desire to share what he had always loved - the simple, innocent and whimsical delights of the human family.
Over the last 25 years - through countless group and solo shows - Raymond has pursued the path with heart, developing a signature style that harkens back to the primitive beauty of pre-Columbian pottery. Each of his playful figures bears an opening into the hollow space within, that space where the soul of the artist breathes. In the glowing rounded bodies, in the gestural freedom of tiny hands and flying limbs you can hear the call of the clay as it speaks to him, and to us, of another time - a time when eternal images cradled the soul of the world in our daily lives.