Current Trio
My paintings begin with a villa in Bonnieux in Provence, France. Since my high school days I have always wanted to learn how to speak French and Spanish and I started with Spanish, thinking that I would take French in college. Well, that was not to be. I never did learn French. But during Covid, Anne, a friend of Cheryl’s, told her that she was going to take a French Zoom class. Cheryl told me about it and I was totally excited to see if I could join the class. I talked to the teacher and she said I could join but that it would be best if I Zoomed in on the first class to see if it would work. Well…none of the students were beginners and I couldn’t understand a word that anyone said! Fortunately, Amandine (the teacher) was willing to take me on one-on-one! That was 3 years ago and while I’m still a beginner, I love my teacher, we have beaucoup de rires and I can actually understand when a French person speaks back to me if they do it tres lentement! All of this to say that this first painting is of the villa that we rented in Bonnieux. The view from the villa was of the valley below, covered in fields of red poppies and lavender just beginning to bloom. This little village is so quintessentially French. It is a hilltop village with 1800 full-time residents, cobblestone streets, and the yellow and blue colors typical of Provence.
July began with day after day of torrential rains. Late one afternoon we were having a particularly heavy storm when all of a sudden the sky cleared and we saw the most amazing sunset! The colors in this painting are not exaggerated, this is what the sky really looked like on this evening!
This next painting has taken me since March to complete. I had the worst time trying to get the perspective right on this building and I’m not quite sure that it’s totally right even now but here it is. Cheryl and I were in Provincetown in February over the winter. That’s a pretty quiet time in Provincetown. The tourists are mostly gone and the restaurants are pretty much closed. But for a two week period the owner and employees of Sal’s Place took over the Squeeling Pig and transformed it! We had a dinner reservation for Valentine’s Day and as we were walking up to the front door the scene that we were met with was so warm and welcoming and so quintessentially Cape Cod, that I just had to try to capture it!