Imagine a velvet curtain-lined space privately tucked away in the heart of Le Marais (in the center of Paris) on a weeknight - and within this space you are sitting with charcoal and paper in hand, along with others being guided by a beautiful French artist and her muse for a live nude drawing experience. Between petite sessions the artist shares her poetry and the muse wanders with a joy-filled gaze as she looks at the art that you have created.

I feel in my heart of hearts that this might be the Paris dream of many listening today, and this was precisely how I met my guest for today’s episode - living a Paris dream.

Last week she invited me to her newest exhibition, Originelles: Les 22 Allegories – a body of work that moves between painting, poetry, and archetype. What began as an intimate artistic exploration has grown into a symbolic language rooted in memory, embodiment, and the lived experience of the feminine body.

About Déborah

Déborah Calfond is a French artist whose practice weaves painting, drawing, and poetic text. Trained in spatial design and architecture, her work explores the body as a site of memory, transmission, and sacred language. Rooted in her French, Tunisian, and Jewish heritage, she engages symbolism; particularly the Major Arcana and Hebrew letters, as living structures through which image and word become incarnate.

Alongside her studio practice, she leads poetic live-drawing sessions that approach the body as ritual space and collective experience.

Artist Statement

Déborah Calfond’s work explores the body as a site of metamorphosis, memory, and animality. Fragmented and hybrid, oscillating between human, animal, and landscape, the body becomes raw material and reveals our multiplicity.

Informed by a reflection on mother-child relationships, transmission, and transgenerational heritage, her work examines the visible and invisible traces that history leaves within bodies. Through painting, drawing, and writing, she seeks to render these ruptures perceptible and at times to gesture toward their repair.

Her expressive paintings, combining oils, inks, pigments, and handwritten text, give rise to figures in motion evolving within uncertain spaces, somewhere between landscape and stage. The body becomes a lived territory, at once memory and becoming.

I am filled with joy to sit with Deborah in today’s episode to explore where this work comes from, the stories that it carries, and what continues to move beneath its surface.

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To Connect More Deeply with Déborah:

www.deborahcalfond.com

Originelles Les 22 Allegories

Support Déborah’s Crowdfunding Project

www.instagram.com/deborahcalfond

To Connect More Deeply with Patricia:

www.sacredparis.com

www.instagram.com/sacredparis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sacredparis

Thank you for listening...until next time, may you find the sacred in everything you do