Toujour Amour

France a love affair of countless journeys over decades I  surrender to its warm embrace and paint from my heart. A year lived  in Provence.  A walk on a 1,000 year old pilgrimage path in Languedoc.  Sojourn by aqua Mediterranean to experience colour through the eyes of Chagall, and Renoir.  “Toujour Amour” is a love of everyday France. The swoon of castle tops on The Dordogne,  or a sip of wine under a gnarled olive tree.

These newest paintings are experiences, whispered secrets in fifteenth century stone hamlets it’s slate roof tops glint in evening luminescence. Stone homes burnished, ages worn brightened in each season.  Iris, wisteria, rose, a moving tapestry of life lived to fullest.

Time lost in Fairytale hamlets and deep in prehistoric caves awakens as I stir pigment and water.  My imaginings energize on canvas.  I surrender, to the breath of ancient, myth, magic.  I vision a story, a design of simplistic line, movement of multilayered beasts rendered by 14,000 year old artists on the  walls of Lascaux.

I ask what is it that calls to be painted then feel the cord of creativity, a soul lust urges me to express and sing my experience.  Energy bubbles and yearns to be repeated through the filters of my perception, this France is a toujour amour.

France, as if in a dream….

With deeply held experiences while painting France, I surrender to my dreams captured from nocturnal, lucid and, the place between sleep and awake that Robert Louis Stevenson writes about in his book “Travels with a Donkey in the Cervennes”.

While on a drive to visit a dear friend in near Le Puy  by The Central Massif I view a tapestry of lush hills spotted with grazing cows and sheep. Rugged land wrinkles to a huddle of stone habitation. Deep slate stone roofs sag to another and then another, dip down then up, and like a pirouette a conical colombier, the dovecoat, the final flourish is capped with