Spring at last

We have now enjoyed a few days of sustained warmth and the affect on the countryside was immediate.

When we have a spring like this, all the blossom comes out simultaneously and from afar, the mass of flowers makes it look as if the valley is coated in a fine sprinkling of snow.

Bat fatality

We are busy getting the houses ready for the start of the season in May.  This is an annual task which sees us in work clothes and paint-spattered for a good eight weeks.  All the nooks and crannies of accumulated junk have to be cleared.  The cave under the house is a great storage place, it keeps an even temperature during the year and was formerly where the wine was stored.  The huge barrels which are still there, are now acting as housing for David's wood scraps.  For twenty years we have had a colony of Pipistrellus pipistrellus hanging from its vaulted ceiling.  All summer long they fly in and out of the cave entrance in the courtyard, wheeling round in the warm summer air catching insects on the wing.  We have had many broods of young but this year our first fatality!

I found his dessicated body on the stone floor where I mistook him for a dead leaf.  He weighs 1 gram! David dusted him off and he has been added to our collection of dead beetles and tiny bird skeletons that lives in David's studio.

winter again

On Saturday we set off to have a light lunch with some friends near Mont Ventoux.  The route takes us past the magnificent Abbey de Sénanque, here clothed in its sombre winter hues, the surrounding lavender like cornrows.

peering over the edge of the precipice

In the dip of the valley the cold hung to the building like a mist.

  

Then through the Gorge de la Sénancole which was punctuated by frozen streams and icicles,

into this . . . the winter just won't go away!

Monty Don's French Gardens

Monty Don's French Gardens last week featured le jardin de la Louve at Bonnieux.  I did not see it myself but Janet Dickson, a les Bassacs regular and the instigator of our expedition to the garden last September, alerted me to Monty's enthusiastic visit in last week's programme about Artistic Gardens.  If you missed it, you can still see it on BBC iplayer.

Nicolas de Staël in the Vaucluse

The painter Nicolas de Staël arrived in the Vaucluse in the summer of 1953. He rented an old silk barn from a local family at Lagnes, just below Gordes.  In 1951 he had met and become close friends with the poet Renee Char who lived at L'isle sur la Sorgue, and Char encouraged him to come to the area to paint.  De Staël was immediately taken by the light, colour and form of the valley and wrote to a friend "the infinite basin of the Vaucluse is clothed by good rocks, white marble  and a sea of green composed of three or four different woods, its amazing, the richness of this countryside".  

paysage de Vaucluse no 2 1953

paysage de Vaucluse no 3 1953

De Staël, an original and vital painter, had spent the post-war years experimenting with questions of space and colour.  He was embarking on a very productive and innovative period of his career.  He did not regard himself as an abstract painter, but rather saw himself as part of the tradition of naturalistic painters such as Constable, Corot and Courbet, whose work he admired.  He wrote,  "I do not ‘objectify’ anything that I see. I do not paint before seeing. I am not looking for anything other than painting ‘visible’ by everyone." He attempted to express his sensations of space and light by creating successive layers of coloured texture. "I need to feel life in front of me and to capture it completely as it enters my eyes and skin,"

In November 1953 he bought a beautiful chateau at Menerbes.  After a life-time of retched poverty he had begun to have some critical acclaim, particularly in America, and this enabled him to buy his family a home.

views of Menerbes 1954

In 1953 he had seen the first exhibition of Matisse's cut-outs which had a great influence on his work. He gradually simplified his method of composition until with four or five broad sweeps of colour he was able to evoke the constituant elements of a landscape. He drew and painted incessantly filling the three enormous white studios in the chateau with fresh paintings.

De Staël became friends with the english art critic and historian Douglas Cooper who lived nearby at Uzes.  Cooper, friend also to Picasso, had a substantial collection of cubist paintings which he often went to study. Some of de Staël's most powerful and dramatic paintings of this period are of the journey between Menerbes and Uzes.  He was a great draughtsman and would often stop on the journey to note down compositions for paintings to be worked up later in the studio.

series Route d'Uzes 1954

Of this work he wrote, "One never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records, with a thousand vibrations, the shock one has received, or will receive, be it the same or different"

One year after painting this series, Nicolas de Staël jumped to his death from the terrace of his studio which faced the sea at Antibes.  He was only 41 years old and in a decade of intense painting he had produced over 700 canvases.   On de Staël's death Cooper described his friend as "the truest, the most considerable and the most innately gifted painter who has appeared on the scene in Europe or elsewhere during the last 25 years." 

Ciel et Mer 1955

David and I were asked to write an article for Artists and Illustrators Magazine about where to paint in Provence.  This is linked to the fact that Marseille is European Capital of Culture 2013.  We tried not to give away too many of our favourite spots and we had fun visiting, photographing and painting in Cassis, Aix and St Rémy.  You can read the article by clicking on this link Artists and Illustrators magazine article

Walking the salt routes

Looking for painting sites near Buoux, a tiny hamlet in the heart of the Aiguebrun valley this weekend, David and I walked some of the salt routes that run through the Luberon.  In provencal they were known as 'lou camin salié.

These ancient cobbled pathways were used for moving salt from the salt pans of the Camargue into the hinterland.  Known as white gold and once as valuable ounce for ounce as gold, the Fort at Buoux had to protect the salt trains as they made their way slowly north.  Salt played its part in opening up the interior of France, establishing early trade routes through unpopulated areas.  Many of the first roads were enlarged salt routes, which in turn were based on sheep tracks.   Mules were used to bring it through the hills and along the perilous tiny paths.  The beautiful winding road from Lourmarin to Bonnieux was one of these paths which was eventually widened to take carts then cars.

The paths that David and I were taking were lined with high dry stone walls and even the most remote parts showed signs that the land had once been cultivated with deep terraces reaching up into the wilderness. 

Happy New Year from Les Bassacs!

Christmas Lights, Apt

Snow!

Its snowing in Les Bassacs, a bit slushy, but little by little . . .

Menerbes

I am reading Elizabeth David: A Mediterranean Passion by Lisa Chaney and in the book there is an account of Elizabeth David's winter spent in Menerbes with a picture of the house she rented with some friends.

The house is Le Castellet which those of you who have been painting in Menerbes will instantly recognise as the distinctive house at the extreme western point of the village. 

 On a particularly cold and windy day like today, I was amused to read about her struggles to cope in a draughty house in the middle of a Provencal winter.  She says "the weather has been a disgrace, the place as cold and wet as Charity". They battle to keep warm around a log fire that they have to keep stocked with prodigious amounts of wood whilst being driven mad by the “relentless screaming” of the Mistral.  Well its not as bad as all that here, but I know the kind of winter she is writing of.

I have a vintage (tattered and torn) treasured copy of her book French Country Cooking, with beautiful illustrations by John Minton, from which I often cook.  She was reading the proofs of the book whilst staying in Menerbes.