Graciela Rodo Boulanger

I was born in 1935 in La Paz, Bolivia. But my earliest memories are of Oruro, a small mining town hidden away in the cold plateau region of the "altiplano", where my parents had come to live. I can see myself now, as a child sketching innumerable imaginary dances next to the piano where my mother would be playing the music of Brahms, Bach or Schubert she so loved. Music and drawing which ere to be the determining factors of my whole existence I found far more alluring than any children's games.

Our house was opposite the station and I feel sure that the constantly passing trains I used to watch with my sister already conjured up in my mind the idea of journeys, meetings, departures and the mysterious comings and goings of life.

It was natural for me to start learning the piano with my mother and I was just seven years old when we moved to La Paz because of my father's job. I was sent to the German school there and continued with the piano and drawing. One day, my father who had always encouraged my interest in painting took me by the hand and introduced me to my first "real" artist's studio: it belonged to the painter Rimsa. I was just 11 years old. It was a new world for me?

When I was fifteen I gave my first recital and then went to Santiago, Chile, where I spent a year studying at the National Conservatory of Music and at the Academy of Art.

In 1952, I went to Europe on my own for the first time. I was going to study in Madrid. However, whilst I was visiting various European cities, I was very much taken by Vienna and decided to stay. All I noticed about this city which had suffered from the War and which was still occupied by the Russians, the Americans, the British and the French was the sound of pianos, flutes or violins coming from every house. This helped to make my first winter there, which was exceptionally hard and during which I saw snow fall for the first time in my life, less cold and easier to bear.

A year later, however, I was to leave Vienna and return to my native land where, beneath the azure sky of La Paz, an amazing city 3700 meters above sea level. surrounded by mountains, far from the sea and on the edge of vast high plateaus, I was reunited with the climate I knew so well, and an atmosphere in which silence and solitude contrast with the rhythms of drums and Indian pipes, and children express their feelings in games which are sometimes serious, sometimes lonely or joyful, but always full of charm and mystery.

At the age of 22, I was to leave my birthplace once more never dreaming that my departure was almost definitive and that I was to return for a brief visit only nine years later. I was going to live in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, thus making a first step towards Europe for which I still nourished nostalgic feelings. Here, I gave a few recitals and exhibited paintings, but the combined pressures of music and painting became such that I decided to give up the piano as a career in order to devote my energies to painting.

I stayed in Argentina for four years and it was in the north, in a very small town, that I saw my first engraving by Friedlaender. Just as Vienna had dazzled me with its musical environment, this engraving and the exhibition by the same artist that I saw later in Buenos Aires were undoubtedly responsible for introducing me to a hitherto unknown universe and for arousing in me an overwhelming desire to study the techniques of engraving.

In 1961, I arrived in Paris and began work in Friedlaender's studio, where I was to remain, barring a few interruptions, until 1968. In 1962, I married a Frenchman and we then spent 18 months in the Middle East. When I returned to Paris, I continued with painting and engraving. From 1966 onwards my engravings were published by A. Lublin of New York. In 1968 I set up my own engraving studio and in 1970 I acquired an artist's studio.

I spend my time in both studios and still work with the same enthusiasm as when I made my first drawings. I alternate between engraving and painting and my work is based on long hours of meditation, patience and application. And at the end of the day, whilst my daughters draw, I sit down at the piano and play.

--Paris 1973