This book reveals a glimpse of the palette of Yahne Le Toumelin, painter and Buddhist nun, mother of Matthieu Ricard, monk and interpreter of the Dalai Lama.
From her Surrealist beginnings in Mexico with Leonora Carrington and then André Breton, she has retained a strong taste for the dreamlike and the imaginary.
Un ange dans la soupe, 1991.
Her paintings, imbued with a certain lyricism, plunge us into a world of colours where light splashes onto the eye and is used as a point of force. Sometimes sparkling, often sober, always powerful, her painting has evolved over the years, moving towards greater abstraction. Looking at his canvases, you can sense the fleeting nature of the gesture and "the light that is in everyone and everything".
We all have this Buddha nature," she says. All we have to do is awaken it by ridding ourselves of disordered emotions, obsessions with concepts, and attachments to needs that are over-multiplied in a society that calls man a consumer and whose greed translates into unquenchable thirst. Everything that harasses us obscures our true nature. In fact, people have a blind and childish faith in the solidity of things and in the illusory permanence of what is composed and therefore decomposes".
Maître Dogen, 2000.
Buddhists do not believe in the illusion of the world, which they regard as a mirage or a dream from which they can awaken. Yahne Le Toumelin shows this in her paintings. If you allow yourself to be carried away by her paintings, you can feel the gradual disappearance of existence, a peaceful space set against the tumult of the world. A perception of infinity that invites meditation.
Yahne Le Toumelin with her son Matthieu Ricard.
Born in 1923 to Breton parents who had emigrated to Paris, Yahne began painting at an early age. After her first exhibition in Paris in 1957, she took part in numerous salons until 1970. At the same time, she felt drawn to the example and life-choice of Alexandra David-Neel. Ordained as a nun by His Holiness the Karmapa in 1968 in Sikkim, she remained close to her "sublime Master" Nyingmapa for several years, before spending some thirty years in the Himalayas. Since 1977, she has lived and painted in a Buddhist centre in the Dordogne.
Text: Brigitte Postel
Book
Light ? laughter from the sky
Yahne Le Toumelin
Foreword by Matthieu Ricard
Editions de la Martinière ? 50 ?
