Last Day in Alayrac - Last Painting left to be Finished at Home - Au Revoir to Christine and Pimpa - One Last Back Road surprise.

 The Final day has come!

Will have to finish this at home. No more days in the cool shade of the Sycamore lined
banks of the Aveyron across from the medieval city of St. Antonin Noble Val.

JP's entry in the studio log.

We say "au revoir" to the villa concierge/manager, Christine, and Pimpa.
We will miss her kindness and wise advice.

And we could not resist one last drive on an unknown back road. 

Vide Granier or Empty the Attic: The term for a town yard sale

Bits and pieces to clear out before we go home Saturday morning....

Saturday, June 6, 2015

If you removed cars from three quarters of the dooryards around here, you wouldn’t know what century it was. This place is infused with, suffused with, steeped in, drenched in, enveloped in time in a way totally different from my experience of the states. Being bone idle also promotes  musing. There’s not much news.  We continue living in a beautiful landscape, eating the food it provides and sleeping to the sounds of its night birds.  JP is working inside today. He has painted a few foreground wheat stalks and is putting the color into the poppies; WAIT! he’s signed it!  Wine!

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

We hung out in St. Antonin yesterday across the river from the town and church so that JP could fulfill a lifelong dream and set up an easel on the banks of the Seine and paint.  Different river but still France.  
       He  had found a yellow-green chaise for me to lounge about in. After some of that I clambered  up 78 steps in the side of the hill thinking I was going to see a view, but found a cemetery. I have a picture. Burials seem very heavy, very concrete and very permanent. There is not a glimmer of the ineffable.   In another direction I found a bright cold supermarket, the most modern we’ve run across, where I got replacement sea salt, pepper in a grinder, ground coffee and Earl Gray Tea. And a can of Exceedingly Cold Dutch Beer! I lugged that back into the French Painting under the pollarded trees with the subtly dappled light on the banks of the gently flowing green Aveyron, Then sat in my garish plastic chaise,  read my Spenser mystery aloud and swilled the beer.  Ugly American but so pleasant. Actually, numbers of people came over to look and we conversed quite happily. A strong grounding in charades helped.

There is very little litter along the roads. It makes a difference in the pleasure of the driving. There are also very few fat people. I haven’t seen one fat kid the whole time. Maybe because the bread crusts and the sausage are so tough it takes longer to eat. People around here must have very strong teeth too. And the hills are full of bicyclists with white hair and lined faces.

The landscape here is changing. The wheatfields that were green when we came are now the blond of a 6 year old in the summer. The deep red brick fields are  starting to turn green as the sunflowers grow. The cut hay fields are a patchy scraped yellow brown.  The red roses are climbing up the ivy below our second floor windows and the ivy itself is growing into the house. There are pink roses lower down with a heavenly fragrance and the bees and bugs and birds are sounding  happy happy happy.

Thursday, June 11  We are running out of trash to read. I thought I would be forced to get into the Granta Book of the American Short Story with “…a selection from the best works of American short fiction published in the last fifty years.” 1992 .    I avoid short stories; I never read them in The New Yorker because they are dismal and tiresome but we were desperate.   Then I saw the following endorsement on the back cover: “What links most of the stories in this collection is a sense of indefinable disquiet, gathering unease, growing anxiety, incipient panic, imminent crises- things turning menacing, insignificant lives beginning to fracture…  This is a rich collection.” Tony Tanner, Guardian

   I rest my case!  And here’s an Eric Ambler that fell behind the bookcase. Another great thing about mysteries before 1985. NO COMPUTERS!!!!!!

Christmas Carol line. “ The cherry tree bowed low down, bowed low down to the ground. And Mary gathered cherries while Joseph stood around…”  That’s exactly it! The cherries in the next garden are ripe and the branches are bowed down with their weight. You just extend your hand straight out and they rest in your palm. Good too.

On the Banks of the Aveyron in in SW France, JP Paints His Last. - and the Castle of Penne

I have harbored a secret fantasy of being a plein air painter on the banks of the Seine. So here I am on the banks of  the Aveyron in St. Antonin Noble Val. Betsy reading a Robert Parker novel beside me, French tourists stopping to comment and chat and instruct us in their lovely language. It will do,  

Maybe two more days if I am pushing. 

A last look at the castle of Penne from the terrace of the restaurant. It had an intent and history as grim and bloody as it looks.

Video shows a panoramic view of the Avayron Valley from the castle. (JP's Video)




And Betsy's View - Vertigo Susceptible? Do not watch. 

Wheat Fields and Poppies Done and "Betsy" Sunday at St, Antonin Market

Painting complete  - for now. La Poste disappears around the bend.

Operatic atmospherics - you can see I do not exaggerate.

Then off to a Betsy day - a holiday in St Antonin - Sunday Market

Following Betsy into the St. Antonin Market

Painting finished. Bird Identified

Saturday June 6, 2015

If you removed cars from three quarters of the dooryards around here, you wouldn’t know what century it was. This place is infused with, suffused with, steeped in, drenched in, enveloped in time in a way totally different from my experience of the states. Being bone idle also promotes philosophical musing. There’s not much news.  We continue living in a beautiful landscape, eating the food it provides and sleeping to the sounds of its night birds.  JP is working inside today. He has painted a few foreground wheat stalks and is putting the color into the poppies; WAIT! he’s signed it!  Wine!

Sunday, June 7, 2015

My day. We went to St Antonin Noble Val, had coffee and croissants to the accompaniment of a dark voiced singer with her accordion and found a used Oiseaux d’Europe. Our rare bird appears to be a gallinule  poule d’eau, or a moor hen. I’ll have to tell Anya.   I remember Cama talking about gallinules. I think. They are as common as dirt all through Europe, Eastern Europe and lots of Russia. So much for the lifetime list… We’ll leave the book here for the next people.  For us they will remain our favorite French bird just as the French oak, also very very very common all over Europe and beyond is our favorite tree, Quercus robur, commonly known as the English oak or pedunculate oak or French oak. It is native to most of Europe, and to Anatolia and to Israel to the Caucasus, and also to parts of North Africa. We are not alone in our preference. It is a national symbol of the Basques. Somewhere in the Pyrenees, surrounded by a fine fence, is the stump of the original oak where decisions were made. A new tree about 25 feet high is right next to it.  Maybe Fred can get us one. There are jillions of babies 2 inches high along all the edges of the fields, but I don’t think we should bring one home……

Water bird and History

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Some of the mystery of our black water bird is solved. This morning I caught a glimpse of the bird I had seen accompanied by two babies. JP evidently had seen one of the babies before. I got just a flash of a little one on my video. We’ll look at it tonight on the computer and see if we can get some single photos. We’ve gone to check numerous times since, but no luck. Whoa! Just as I’m sitting in the car next to the upper pond, I can see what looks like a tiny slender duck with an eensy weenie baby swimming behind. The head looks greenish black.  In the sunlight, the mother’s beak looks bright red as JP saw the first time.   We watched them swim along the very edge where the grasses stems are in the water and the video can’t catch them. I’ll see if they come away from the edge to where they are silhouetted. This is likely a different family that has gotten used to seeing a blue citroyen parked above their home.  I wish all you bird lovers were here as this must be a candidate for a lifetime list. I hope Alan knows something about it. When it came out of the water behind the grasses, you could see just its tail flick up and down as it walked. There is definitely white there. We have looked on line at waterbirds of southern France, and Holland, but nothing matches.

This morning I read more of  The Albigensian Crusade book to JP.  Simon de Montfort was the brilliant, charismatic, recklessly courageous, and self righteous leader of the crusaders. His army was made up of mercenaries and volunteers from the north who were promised remission of sins and sometimes land, for 40 days service. So the size of his army waxed and waned while he marched around this huge area taking fortified towns by siege, putting villagers to the sword and burning heretics. Many times a siege had to be lifted because, once saved after the 40 days, large groups of men high tailed it back home in the North. For 6-8 years, the bishops, the southern princes, Peter II from Spain, Pope Innocent III, Simon and Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse repeatedly attacked, plotted, fought, surrendered, changed sides,  preached, grabbed land, made truces then reengaged. One day during a siege of Toulouse, the women were blindly lobbing stones down over the parapet with a trebuchet; one hit Simon and killed him!  We are finding  that his son is not his equal and the French are getting pretty tired of crusades anyway so now things look good for the Southern forces. Unfortunately the last chapter is titled “Inquisition” and that is not going to end well. One illustrative detail: when the feckless Count Raymond VI died, the crusaders, who refused to believe he was a real catholic no matter what he did, denied him a Christian burial and “his coffin stood for many years outside the priory of the Hospitallers while his son begged successive popes to permit his burial in the chapel.  The coffin was still there in the 14^th century (70 years later), but by the 16^th, rats had destroyed the wooden coffin and Raymond’s bones had disappeared.“  Sic transit gloria mundi and “same old same old”.   When we finish this book, we’ll read a Maigret mystery I found in the bookcase.  Time to go to market.

There are a lot of those little bright blue butterflies around. We have a form of one at the pottery and it is pretty worn. So I went to the hardware store, one of those old places with narrow aisles and nooks and crannies, crammed to the gills with one of everything in the world.  John V, you would love it. Sure enough they had a filet a papillon!  We have it here and an empty mayonnaise jar and will await developments. If we get one, I can go to the art store in Gaillac and get a bit of clay for an impression.

Wheat Fields and Poppies, Painting End Game and Gus Gus from Cinderella Meets Mousetrap Guillotine.

 Painting nearing completion - Poppies and Wild Flowers in Foreground Missing. Note "Le Poste",
zippy yellow mini mini van, making rounds. Rural mail delivery with French panache!
 

Betsy reading aloud a Simenon, Maigret mystery to keep the creative process company and maintain a French ambiance. 

Poppy details to be painted in.

Gallic wit - wasn't the cat in Cinderella named Lucifer? By the way
as you would expect from the country that gave us the guillotine - it really works! 

Going for A Walk

June 2,2015

Start the walk here.

The door at the top of the stairs goes into our apartment. In that dark arch, you can just barely see a column. It is from Roman times, 2000 years ago. 

The beginning of the path that leads down a sharp ridge to the road.

View out from path a quarter of the way down.

"Attention"

"Viperes"

"Danger"

Wiggly mama snake with 3 cute babies

Our favorite sign in all of France.

The path leads into the road  that these greenhouses are on. The noisy noisy frog ponds are just on your left.  This is the Ferme Bio that makes the ambrosial cheese. Oh yes, and the poppies in the wheat. JP is painting this now. The walk takes us up and along the ridge dead ahead next to the sky.

JP setting up. Our village is behind him up in the clouds. The path comes down the ridge on the right.

Anya, the lovely cheese lady. She was just back from a yearly village get together to which we would have been welcome. Oooooh dear. 

The view down from the upper ridge of the bowl. There are sunflowers just starting to grow in this red field. The village is right in the middle back. 

Just another little village seen from the road. Usually there are cows in this field.

Now we are back. The starting courtyard is on the other side of this building.

Meet me at 7:30 tomorrow morning and we can go together!  Better make it 8:30.

For something COMPLETELY different.

This was on the vegetable cart at market. What the heck?  I cut off that thick jacket and boiled it. It tasted like a beet wrapped in corn stalks and roasted over an open fire, except that it wasn't as tasty as either one. Dreadful looking thing, isn't it?

Time to go read to JP

Wheat Field, Poppies, Gathering Storm ( Work in Progress ) and Chorus of Critics in Pond Across the Road.

Day 4 and Color - Days More to Go!! Hear Chorus of Critics ( video) in Pond Across the Road..
May not be a good sign that I begin to understand what they are saying.

Wheat fields, Poppies, Gathering Storm - Painting Begun and A Walk Through It's landscape - JP's Post

Brush and Raw Umber Drawing to Start

The Setup and
In the video survey the sweep of the landscape. 

Trip South to Foix under the Pyrenees

Friday, May 29, 2015

Yesterday we went to Foix, two hours due south “ in the foothills of the Pyrenees” the seeing of which is my third and final objective for this stay after Carcassonne and the Chauvet cave recreation which we saw last week. We counted up all our coins. There is a nice web site which figures out the cost of  tolls and the likely cost of Gasoil between any two points in France – and beyond, as far as we know. You need to have enough coins because there are no people available to help you change paper money at any of the toll stops we’ve seen.  The roads to Toulouse and beyond are plenty fast but somehow more modest than our highways. There are trucks but fewer of them and every 8-10 Km there is an Aire de someplace local, a rest stop with facilities, picnic tables, a chance for kids to run around and older folks to stretch, and sometimes a restaurant.  I think roads back home are King, where here a lot of them  are just centuries old paths with a bit of asphalt slapped on top.             Somewhere along the way, we came out from behind an obscuring hill and for a second saw odd jagged clouds floating above the horizon.  No!! Que Merveilleux!!!   We were finally seeing the snowy peaks of the PYRENEES!! It was truly thrilling. Our picture doesn’t get it at all. 

NEXT:

   

Across the wide plain and up into the big foothills we found the town of Foix honest to God NESTLED into the little valleys.  Sometime in 1000-1100 somebody  built a chateau on the tippy top of the pictured tall tall outcropping of limestone. (Take mountain streams surging through layers of limestone for lots and lots of years and you get some fantastical features. Apparently the cliffs under the chateau have caves that show signs of prehistoric habitation. ) One picture is from a postcard because we were much too close under the chateau to show what it looks like. The others are our pictures including the view up from the restaurant where we had lunch.    This was a stronghold of the Cathars but it still fell to the northern crusaders  around 1209. It got traded around for three centuries finally ending up as part of the wide area ruled by Henri of Navarre, a Protestant and a minor relative of the French crown. For lack of other choices, he got chosen by the very Catholic Catherine de Medici to marry her daughter and become King of France.  All sorts of high ranking Protestant Huguenots came to the wedding; the gates of the city were closed and they were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Day . Henri, now Henri IV of France , converted straightaway.  Years later he signed the treaty of Nimes giving religious freedom to protestants .

Back to the 21^st century : After a lovely lunch in the beautiful and gracious center of town, we tried to figure out the byzantine parking payment system that involved many instructions, our number plate, various levels of free and paid time, and the machine which  required exact change, and balked at our using a credit card though it had the slot for it,  naturally all in French. A tall fellow, with a Midwestern accent,  who lived in town , stepped in to help. He was born in Foix, went to Canada when he was five, lived there and in the US for the next 55 years, serving in our army. He was stationed in NY, Georgia and Washington among other places. He retired 3-4 years ago and came back to “this hick town”.   We noticed that after he got us squared away, he helped some other people so it wasn’t just a language problem. 

2nd Painting Done - An Afternoon Walk - 3rd Subject Considered - JP Post

Painting 2 from studio window complete, for now.

An afternoon walk Alayrac in the distance.

Ripening wheat, poppies, dark European oaks, crest the rolling hills.
Mistral squalls gone, the afternoon sun burns out of bell clear blue sky.    

Poppies, ripe wheat, from whence the rich French breads.
I think this will source the next painting.

Betsy walks on between the fields

On Coming, Going and New Painting Almost Done - JP's Post

Coming.

Going.

Any Questions?

New painting almost done. Weather still blustery and unsettled with rain squalls. From a window. Does this still qualify for "plein air"? 

Painting 35,000 years ago and Mine Today - JP'S Post

Thirty Five Thousand Years Ago in a cave above the l' Ardeche River in Southwestern France he (she?) could not post on Facebook so he (she?) went deep into the back of a cave making sure the cave bears had left for the summer and posted these masterpieces.

OK,  so this is only a recreation. Human breathing moisture breeding fungus almost destroyed the paintings in Lascaux so these are forever off limits except to a few. Clearly masterpieces equal to Picasso, Velasquez, Rembrandt and we got only five minutes.  This artist was near to tears in frustration. To see more about the "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" or Chauvet cave in  Villon-Pont d' Arche, France go to Click Here. We do recommend the visit. They have created  an amazing , awe inspiring museum.

At the "Prehistorique" on the banks of the l' Ardeche where we spent the night before the visit.

Betsy attacks veal dinner too beautiful to eat. This is prehistorique?
The French, you know, were always way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to cuisine. 

Next day or 35,000 years,later, depending on how you are counting, JP starts his new painting.

Painting Complete - JP Gets Haircut then on to Carcassonne - JP Post

Completed Paintng -View From Alaryac Kitchen, Oil on Pamnel, 12h x 16w, Signed, Dated 5.23.2015

Before heading out on adventures in other
French territories, shaggy JP gets
trimmed by prettiest, most charming
French coiffeuse pour hommes.

Transformation approved. From now
on I will have to go to France for all
my haircuts.

At the castle in Carcassonne JP meets another handsome French lady.

Is this a comment on the eternal state of affairs between
men and women?

Nonetheless this lady remains the queen on all my castles.