HANAYAMA-AN

THE HERMITAGE OF "LE MONT FLEURI"

All houses have an open name — and a secret name they reveal to you if you listen carefully. It is a hidden mantra one can hardly share — except perhaps at the moment of their transmission.

Let us call mine "Le Mont Fleuri" meaning the flowering hill.

It has always been there, on a height, waiting for me, welcoming me, consoling me unconditionally, letting me breathe and inspiring me anew.

For years, I travelled far, often and long to escape the absence of its architect, its keeper. The USA, Japan, Haiti, the Himalayas — leaving to encounter and to learn was my pledge of survival. That absence slowly transformed into an inner movement, fully alive, which dwells in my heart once more today.

And the question of stillness, which has long obsessed me, now appears to me as a self-evident truth — one I can finally inhabit.

花 hana, the flower

山 yama, the hill

庵 an, the place of méditation

It is in this "reach toward stillness" that HANAYAMA-AN is born: the Hermitage of the Flowering Hill.

One of the finest spaces in this family home thus becomes a place of welcome for individual accompaniment and collective workshops — elegant, intimate, conducive to silence, introspection and creativity.

I hope to open it in the autumn of 2026 to offer regular meditation sessions, creative retreats (intuitive painting, calligraphy, art therapy), and council circles — I would also love to invite friends who write, travel, photograph… to share their work, their knowledge and their books in warm, informal encounters.

The Mimosa Studio, at the Flowering Hill | © Maby

This aspiration extends what has run through my painting from the very beginning: "Nature as muse", as source, as language.

The cycles of plants, the voices of animals, the pulse of the tides, the message of the stars — so many languages that shape the way I create now become modes of connection and understanding offered at HANAYAMA-AN.

This project says aloud what my painting has always carried, like a silent certainty: Nature guides us — the plant in its immanent intelligence, the animal in its unmediated presence, the sea in its immemorial pulse, the cosmos in its slow and sovereign choreography — I do not represent them.

I listen to them.

I let them move through the canvas.

Painting is not an act of representation: it is a mode of attention, a gesture through which something of the invisible world asks to be seen.

Hanayama was born of this same stance — the conviction that nature is an inexhaustible field of emergence, and that the time has come to create a place of sharing wholly dedicated to listening to it.

To learn more, visit the new website www.hanayama.life (in French only) :

HANAYAMA