Meditating with Maurice Marinot (1882

Embroidery is an art of patience. It brings together in the regular breathing of the embroiderer in action the subtle work of the fingers caught in the tangle of colored threads and the meticulous handling of the needle. Like a painter on his canvas, the embroiderer artist brings from her living room, with her keen eye, her share of light and color to this simple fabric which becomes a workshop canvas. Maurice Marinot, who represents this woman, is himself the son of Trojan hosiers. Their own art is hats, knitwear and other knitted clothing. Put on clothes to help you live.

But at 25, the young man, who moved to Paris, felt other calls. At the capital’s School of Fine Arts, his teachers were surprised by his non-conformism. Like other painters of his generation who want to make color roar like “wild beasts”, his palette combines the deep blues and soft purples of fabrics with the mechanical red of the sewing box. As for the pink of the complexion of the hands and the face, it combines with the pale green of the distant garden and the pale brown near the armchair. In this small square painting, a beautiful diagonal also separates the shadow of the bourgeois living room and the fine lace of the window which opens onto an orange sky. In the center, the hands seem suspended, like time.

Four years later, Marinot converted to another craft, after visiting the Viard brothers’ crystal workshops. Molten glass, incandescent and opaque in the fire, translucent and colored when it freezes, will become his new passion for nearly twenty-five years. From the embroiderer who holds her breath to the glassmaker who propels it into the molten mass, the artist is caught in the same impulse: that of trying to “bring out the own life” of the material entrusted to him.