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In 1978 it is the ‘impossible’ and splendidly romantic meeting. I had just been diagnosed with cancer, undergone an operation and five months of different radiations, and I was about to start chemo-therapy, that is, if I even survived the treatment. According to the docters I was a lost case.
Overnight we decided to live together to make the most of the time left to me, which normally would not be a very long time. Guidi leaves Clermont, leaving his house and studios. His daughter Fréderique, who knew and liked me (I was her music teacher in secondary school) quickly decides to come and live with us in that lovely little village hidden in those magnificent woods of Hez-Froidmont that would shortly become well known for its “Festival de la Grange de Fillerval”.
The docters will never know how I survived (lucky chance or miracle of love and/or willpower?) and for twenty years I would be decisive for his carreer as a painter and sculptor. Guidi’s compagnon, his’muse’, his agent, his secretary and even, because he kept on pressing, his wife. An artist myself, my admiration won over common sense and little time after we met, I asked Guidi to stop his potter’s business to devote himself completely to his art.
We have little money but are rich in the love and admiration we feel for each other, we live in a beautiful environment which allows us to work and exhibit and in spite of, or thanks to the cancer still posing a thread to my life, we would always possess an urge to work together, that would remain compelling. So for the following years, until he passed away in 2001, we combined our work, especially “Poems and Sculptures”.
Our life is completely devoted to art marked by personal or professioal travels across the world, a source of inspiration to each of as and for us both.
Guidi and Annie Jeanneret in Fillerval ( Photo Maurice Lababsa )
