Artist En Route: Provence, France (third in a series of articles appearing in Art Avenue magazine)

Arrival: greeted by Cézanne

Arriving in Provence is like walking into a painting. It's so sensually appealing -- in all senses. Arriving in mid September, the light is remarkable. How to describe light? It's not just its clarity, given the dry air and open skies. Right now the light has a quality of softness that imparts a warm, golden glow. Everything is penetrated and sculpted by it, without hard edge. Compared to the brilliantly sharp light I've seen in southern Spain and Greece, the light here seems to caress forms, rather than starkly to chisel or outline them. It warms and insinuates shadows that seem to slide into, rather than cut, the ground. It illuminates in and around the subtly colored foreground planes and unifies them with harmonious background fields.

from Janet's studio window in rural Provence, France

For an idea of the glow here, contrast this photo taken outside my 'studio' here with one in my last column from Vancouver-- also beautiful, I think, but in a different light. My art space here is very different from my little art-house on Saturna Island, but it's workable. I've set up a room here with the art materials I'd unpacked and a make-shift easel of canvas tacked to a thin old piece of wood mounted on rusted garden stools I'd scrounged.

I'm settled for several months in a country house near Aix-en-Provence, home of Cézanne. He is my constant neighbor, whose round bald pate I love and in tribute to whom I've made the Bienvenu digital montage for you. Not only did Cézanne love and never leave Provence for long, but he saw it as few before him ever had. Now, not far from where he lived, I see the real Mt. Ste. Victoire appear the way he painted it again and again: planes of broken color that abut and define mass and that move with the light.

 Cézanne's personal welcome (JS digital montage)

Visual art has a way of teaching us to look in different ways and perhaps to see more. Cézanne's Mt. Ste. Victoire is not just a mountain. It's a changing field of colored planes, a template for a new way of looking and of seeing, an icon in art history, a symbol of a place and of a devotion. This is what it's like to live inside a painting. I start seeing the trees around me as Cézanne trees, the sparks of light as Van Gogh painted them, the colors as both organizing and breaking shapes into Monet-like impressions, the polymorphous possibilities for Picasso-esque forms.

It's a fantasy to think of long-gone painters as companions, but I do. On one of my hikes up Mt. Ste. Victoire, groaning my way along one of the longer and steeper trails, I kept looking for PC+EZ cut into tree trunks, a sign of the boyhood friendship of Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola, who walked these same trails.

view from one of many hikes I took on Mt. Ste. Victoire (JS photo)

Inspiration

Inspiration is everywhere. It's in the abundance of nature, the pace of agricultural rhythms, in the sensory variety of the sights, sounds, smells, and textures that weave through daily life. It's in the vineyards, olive groves, and spent fields of lavender, the red and ochre earth you walk upon. The natural palette is gorgeously harmonious. The ground varies from luscious red-browns to an eye-dazzling range of rich yellows, set in perfect contrasts of deep and diminished sap-greens that slide into silvery olive tones, and blues to break your heart. All the natural pigments could make you as delirious as they might have Van Gogh. Nearby Roussillon, perched atop on of the largest ochre deposits in the world, is famous for its natural pigments, used by painters for centuries... and now I've picked up some too.

JS photos taken while walking along natural ochre trails of Roussillon; natural ochre pigment purchased there, beside vase

It's in the endurance of ways of life here that persist across centuries of turmoil and war, in the ancient ruins you come across in almost every village, the many ancient towns with modern people living in homes with stonework dating back before the Caesars. The past is alive, along with the present. History is apparent even in street names like Rue Verrerie/Anciano Carriero de la Jutarie, written in both modern French and older Provençal (or Occitan). It's in the daily life of people who value living well: the well-prepared meal, the stylistic presentation, the attentively tended market stalls, the butcher who tells us not to miss the art show at the chateau. It's in the art based on this region that now invites you into it, up close and personal. 

Ordinary life becomes extraordinary when it breaks out of the familiar or routine. Art does something similar when it shows us an apple like we've never seen it before. Travel and living in a new location intensify and differentiate experience, pulling  it out of the ordinary lull. Shopping in the local outdoor markets, learning which ones to go to for what, listening to a different language, learning how to go about taken-for-granted things back home become adventures in living daily life. Such sharpening of one's attention is bound to influence how one sees things: teaching us how we need actively to look first, and then to look again. It changes one's perspectives by offering several different ways of looking at once. Not the easiest position to be in for holding confident opinions, but a self-reflectively open position that's very valuable, I think, for life as well as art.

I'm impressed by the attention given to public art and exhibitions everywhere I go. Even my town (not an art centre) has a local vernissage every few months. The nearby village of Loumarin, with only about 1,000 dwellers, boasts more than a dozen independent, active art galleries. This focus on art, so evident in the entire Provence region, seems to go along with a taste for reading and writing. Even in tiniest villages, you find busy independent bookstores and papeteries with their assortments of writing implements (fountain pens!) and papers, the tangibles of a literate culture. Vintage books and pens are also displayed traditionally in weekly open-air market stalls.

Making it as an artist?

I've visited so many nearby places, gone to so many different galleries and art events, and spoken with so many people here, including art students, teachers, and local gallerists, that I'm convinced this region maintains a vital cultural connection to the arts. Art centres and interests abound not only in the central city of Aix-en-Provence, long known for its artistic and cultural life. The many tiny Provençal communities have their art spaces and avid enthusiasts. Yet, emerging artists still typically take a long time to emerge.

Philippe, a mid-career artist/instructor for a workshop I attended gave me his overview of some challenges facing a painter who wants to make a living and gain recognition solely by art. They turned out not be so different from the challenges facing Canadian artists. He said the smaller galleries don't do enough to promote their artists and the larger ones are business conglomerates that deal only with known artists or decide in common which few new ones to promote. Although Philippe shows his paintings in local galleries, the best promotion, he thought, is to have them in the big art fairs that cost a big chunk of money but also attract the big gallerists. In contrast, "no problem" was the answer I got when asking the same question of Max, a fairly recent multimedia graduate of L'Ecole Superieure d'Art in Aix, then showing his intricate computer graphics at a group show promoted by the school. Max said he showed in all sorts of venues (not just galleries) in Belgium, France, and London, as well as having an internet presence with his abstract music. Aside from their artwork, is it their relative life positions or reference points for "success" that account for the somewhat different views of these two full-time artists?

Is what you paint affected by where you are?

Of course, we all affected by the culture we live in and absorb or react to, some more knowingly than others. Even the contemporary "culture" of painting tells us what's hot and what's not. But how much is the content and style of what visual artists paint related to their physical setting?

JS painting, Provençal Suite 1 (Abundance), www.janetstrayer.com

For plein-air artists, certainly it must be. But what about studio-based artists, abstract painters, or those who work from a more conceptual or imaginative base? My own recent experience tells me it is, for me, at least. I'd left for France while a show of my "Spirit of Place" semi-abstract paintings was on exhibit with the North Van Arts Council. I'd was eager to continue further with abstract painting. But after arriving here, "Abundance" is the first painting I did (in progress). I felt impelled to paint it just by being in the country house we'd rented and by Cézanne's palpable imminence here. In a way, it's my homage to both. Surprisingly to me, I couldn't get to work on anything else until I'd done this painting, which subsequently led to a couple more like it. While then pushing into work with non-representational abstracts, as I'd originally intended, those paintings kept changing into more impressionistic landscapes filled with the colors, textures, and sensations surrounding me. If an "abstract" painting of Provence results, good, but I'm ready to go with the flow for now.

The extent to which we're field-dependent or field-independent varies for each of us. This psychological variable pertains to our perceptual-cognitive styles: the extent to which we're influenced by the external context/field versus internal, proprioceptive cues. There are advantages to both. What impressed me, as generally a field-independent person, was the extent to which this flipped in response to the rich and inviting external cues of this Provençal environment.

Aix-en-Provence

Entire books are devoted to Provence, a region that includes multiple micro-climates and cultural influences from Celtic and Roman to Catalonian and North African. Aix-en-Provence is one of its handsomest towns, with its majestic Cours Mirabeau main street, one of largest and most recognizable fountains in France, and its trendy people-watchers sitting in posh cafés dating back to 1792. I'm fond of this ancient and youthful town that welcomes foreigners but keeps its traditions and a historic ability, despite changes of fortune, to embrace l'art de vivre. Of the many photos I'd like to share with you from Provence, here's one taken in Aix just after the horrible terrorist events in Paris. The town is alive with people, as usual, here celebrating in traditional costume an old Provençal dance with fife and drum.

traditional Provençal costumed folk dance with fife and drum (JS photo in Aix-En-Provence)

Á bientôt, for now. Looking forward to being en route with you in the next installment... in France or perhaps we'll already be in Italy!

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the New Year!

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

 @ janetstrayer.com