Paintings, by Richard Trigaux

I did these paintings between 1985 and 1990, when I was in a New Age community, then known as «Le Faitg» or «Les Amis de la Douceur et de l'Harmonie», located near Serralongue, in Valespir, south of Perpignan. At the time, the New Age was the main social movement in France, and it seemed to match my project for a better society. It was precisely to inspire a desire for such a society that I painted these pictures, using colors with pure vibrations.

However, the director of the community, Viviane Paquereau, first of all was not supposed to be a director, but above all she was a sociopath with an angelic speech. By the time sociopaths were not yet known, so this situation lasted longer than it should have. Add to this the spritual defilements associated with the New Age, which led to very serious things, including several suicides, child abuse, relations with the front national, and of course the pedo on duty. Thus I no longer support the New Age (except to promote its wonderful artists).

Then you'll understand why I waited 34 years (2024) before finally displaying these paintings online, so much suffering they remind me of. Think of them as the immaculate lotus which emerges from the mud of the marshes.

 

Today the New Age is dead as a social movement. But the practice of painting angelic landscapes in pure colors is spreading, and we see more and more of them on the Internet.

 

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This was the first one painted. The technique is not yet perfect; especially I not yet had the airbrush. Nevertheless, I saw bees trying to gather nectar from the orange lilies. We used to cultivate them around the farmhouse.

I no longer have the originals on plywood, lost in the chaos of my departure from the Faitg. Fortunately, I had ektachromes (high-definition photos) made, which were scanned by a professional.

Giant version, 3340 x 2140 pixels

 

 

This one is probably the second. The idea was to illustrate New Age houses. The ground floor is more conventional, with the front door (hidden) where leads the little path.

I can no longer say who was inspired by who (The New Age had a powerful egregore, who provided with so many new things) but people I knew at this time, Catherine and Patrick Marsilli, founded the company Domespace, which builds houses in this style, in cedar wood. More than 200 exist worldwide today (2024), in about ten countries.

This painting made me suffer, lol. I had tried to paint the sky with copper sulfate, to enjoy its beautiful blue. It was a disaster, the gesso background cracking, and I had to redo everything. In fact gesso, used traditionally as a background for oil paintings on canvas, is a poor material, which does not hold up on the hardboard that I used. I had to replace it with white acrylic for walls, and the hardboard with plywood. At this point, it was perfect.

Giant version, 6352 x 4015 pixels

Ektachrome targets

 

 

This one is not a fiction: it is a rare and extraordinary phenomenon we witnessed: clouds showing iridescent colours.

Finally here is the airbrush, which allows to make real gradients, without the brush marks which afflicted the previous ones. By the time, an airbrush was definitely an investment, to which added the air compressor. Rather than a petty desktop model which would always work at the limit of its capacity, I preferred a construction site compressor, which also allowed me to make gradients on the walls of several rooms!

After leaving the Faitg, I understood that I would no longer have the opportunity to make large paintings, and I gave all my equipment to the Nalanda Monastery, who surely had use of it.

Giant version, 6346 x 4027 pixels

 

 

This one shows a quite lively community life. This foreshadows my Elf stories from the 2000s, lol.

Please note that I represented myself (in orange, wearing a paper roll). I did this in other paintings, accompanied with my dream partner. I could not show her at the time, since I had a real companion. But after having experienced these incredible pretenses of the New Age, I had not the heart to take a partner again, and none came forward anyway. Happily, Buddhist milieus allow to have nice friends, but not much love encounters, lol

I did this painting while listening at «Angel Play» by Iasos, one of the pioneers of New Age music, who joined the source of the Inspiration some months ago, early in 2024.

Pinkish stones like this actually exist in many parts of the world. It is sandstone, called Permian sandstone, because they formed during this geological era. Unfortunately, most are sensitive to frost weathering, so that they are seldom used in construction. But numerous New Age interpretations predict a change in our perceptions, see in the physical world itself, suppressing dull colors or gray. As with the Eolis.

 

Giant version, 3319 x 2140 pixels

 

 

Before looking, know that this was done on a drawing by our fake guru Viviane. At the time it was done, I endorsed her ideas, including the somewhat goofy looking man in the right, with the dove perching on his head. In more, she requested me to do this in one week, and in the last moment she added the «urgent» building of a chicken coop! I could do that, but now I am chronically tired.

This was done for a great festival of the Brahma Kumaris in Marseille. They loved it very much, and displayed it prominently in the entrance. After, I went to Marseille to recover it, so that it would be exposed in the Faitg. If I had knew the continuation, I would have left it to the Brahma Kumaris. At least they would do something with it.

Giant version, 6339 x 4013 pixels

 

 

Another great deal of the New Age was about extraterrestrials, especially the contactees (individuals claiming to be in contact with extraterrestrials, and tasked by them to deliver messages to Humanity). My involvement in the scientific study of UFOs at the SAPT in Toulouse had prepared me for this idea. I even met several of these people. However, when I asked to meet their extraterrestrials myself, they always had a good reason to refuse (the best: that I was a vegetarian, ha ha ha ha!) The conclusion was inevitable. Today, these people still exist, and they have recycled into conspirationism. Hence the stories of «reptilian» extraterrestrials.

This painting therefore represents an extraterrestrial spaceship, but with a style decidedly different from other artists. The symbol on the side has become the ones of the Eolis.

Giant version, 6304 x 3997 pixels

 

 

Same theme, this time for inside. We note the Earth entirely green, manifestation of some powerful intervention.

It is deliberate that the paintings have no frame. This is not visible here, but the borders are rounded and painted, in a kind of simple aesthetics.

The quasi-elliptic shape stems from the same approach: a search of simplicity, and to end up with the dictatorship of the right angle. However it is not an ellipse. The formula of the ellipse is:

${\displaystyle \left({\frac {x}{a}}\right)^{2}+\left({\frac {y}{b}}\right)^{2}=1}$

while the formula of my curve is:

${\displaystyle \left({\frac {x}{a}}\right)^{2}+\left({\frac {y}{b}}\right)^{2}=1}$

I even gave a name to this kind of curves, generalisations of the conics: the comics. Indeed by just varying the power, we can create a great variety of shapes.

 

Giant version, 6445 x 4082 pixels

ektachrome targets

 

 

This one, at least, is more a personnal daydream than an «activisr» painting. But it shows how the archetype of beaming is ancient and common.

Well, a wonderful spaceship beaming a vulgar van, my New Age fellows did not liked much this painting, lol

This painting also was a classical study of a night scene, expressing here the mysterious ambiant of some secret encounter among initiates.

In painting, this poses some specific technical difficulties. But the silver photography often ruins the effect, especially when the brush strokes become more visible than the elements of the scene. In the instance, the photograph added a common mistake: set the timer as a function of the average luminosity of the whole scene. In a night scene it is a catastrophe, greying the blacks and burning the clear colors. The blacks I could restaure them, but the pink faces of the characters in the van are irretrievably destroyed.

About the technique...

All these paintings were made with acrylic paint. This material is presented as the nec plus ultra of painting, even better than oil (if you prefer oil, think alkyds). I disagree with this statement, for two reasons:

🐼acrylic dries very quickly. This is an advantage if you want to superimpose layers, but a serious disadvantage if you want to make gradients with a brush, as with oil. There are retardant mediums, and I have successfully used glycerin. But the ideal would be a binder which polymerizes with ultraviolet light, like dentist resins. The paint remains fluid as long as we need, then we flash it to solidify it.

🐜Manufacturers provide acrylic which is not very opaque, so it takes several layers to become opaque. But this then gives reliefs with very visible brush strokes, as in the painting above. You can dilute, then the reliefs disappear. But the brush strokes remain too visible! For this reason, thin multiple layers were used in the past, and today we have the airbrush. Here too, we could have paints as opaque as offset inks, which mediums would allow to thicken or to thin, depending on the technique we use.

 

It is conceivable that many people will continue to paint. But today, computers offer far more powerful tools for creating images, and Artificial Intelligence promises to create them much faster. The weak point remains printing: only expensive six-color machines would offer sufficient quality to accurately render the pure or pastel colors of the New Age.