Before I settle down to a summer’s work it’s good to do a little gypsy roaming.  I just had a great break from my routine, exploring Provence.  At first I enjoyed the companionship of wonderful friends at Le Beaucet in a delightful country home. We saw the sights, enjoyed the regional foods and wines, and were expertly guided, tended and fed by Mary James and Xavier (www.maryjames.net) .

In my journal I made a list of sounds and sights and smells that were especially vivid.  And of course, tastes.  There were many.  It was a sensual feast from morning until night.  Lavendar and garlic in the markets, wild thyme disturbed by my feet on a hike up the hill,  patinas that were rich and complex, cicadas in the heat, a tomato reduction dressing an eggplant that I will not soon forget.

The second week of my journey I took off by myself with my tent and sleeping bag to explore more unknown territory.  Mary James equipped me with a giant map that I’d stop and consult about 40 times a day.  Thank goodness France’s signage is very logical and finding one’s way is made simple.  The un-simple thing is navigating a 10th century road in a car if anyone else decides to come from the opposite direction.

I circumnavigated Mont Ventoux and walked the streets of more hilltowns than I can recount.  I also took some afternoons to sit beside swimming pools in the intense heat.  I chose campgrounds with pools that had splendid views so I could swim and paint and rest all at the same time. I’d paint a while, then fall asleep in the heat, water  sounds lulling me.  Then I’d wake up and paint some more.  Camping allows for a lot of intimacy with the nature of a place.  I loved going to sleep to the sounds of the cicadas, and waking to the dawn birdsong.  Or seeing the moon through my tent’s little window.  In the hotel  at the airport all sound was muffled in thick carpet, and all moonlight masked by drapery.

What did I bring back?  Recognition of how I love to sit by water.  Recognition that French food is wonderful, but in the same way that North Carolina food, or any food grown and prepared with love is wonderful.  I brought back a fascination with the textures of ancient surfaces– the way a thousand year old piece of cypress used as a supporting beam gets eaten away, but stays strong;  the surface of stucco when it chips and peels and changes color;  the immense shade cast by trees when they’re allowed to grow as tall as they want without being cut down for “progress”;  the elegance of women who listen to their own inner voices instead of enslaving themselves to some kind of commercial standard of beauty and rightness; the energy,  imagination and wildness of Cezanne’s landscapes, which made me feel timid by comparison;  the brilliant engineering of the Romans, seen up close and still functional;  the logic of good national road planning;  the kindness of strangers;  a few new words added to the vocabulary;  a newfound love for the afternoon glass of French rose– if you’d told me I’d love it six months ago I wouldn’t have believed you.

But waking up this morning, thinking I was still in France, I realized I took away something else.  Because I traveled alone, in the absence of conversation–in silence– I took into my body a group of  kinesthetic impressions from the hundreds of miles speeding by under my car, the arcs of the many roundabouts, the textures under my feet, the buzz and  hum of the life around me, the cyclical movement of the sun and moon.

Because I stopped each day to paint the place where I was, to examine it with care and attempt to represent the feeling of it, I brought it deeply into my consciousness.  There was a kind of oneness that occurred between me and that lovely place  that went deeper than tourism.  This all came to me in a rush, before I’d really opened my eyes to the day, believing I was still in France .  Swinging my feet out of bed  I  felt the smooth texture of my bedroom’s heart pine floor and that texture told  my body I was not in France.  Returning from a camping trip when he was 3 years old , my youngest son Stewart announced “I miss my tent”.  I know exactly what he meant.

the loud creek

Last weekend I camped beside a loud stream near Asheville.  All night I got to hear the stream rush by– my favorite way to sleep.  The canopy was dense so I could only catch small bits of the mountain starlight.  My alarm clock was a loud crow who would arch through the trees, cutting his handsome black silhouette against the green patterned canopy and insisting I get up.  On Saturday, in spite of the the crow,  I slept two hours later than my definition of sleeping in because it was so delicious.

For entertainment I started by visiting the Faculty Show at UNC-Asheville (www.unca.edu).  I was particularly intrigued by the work of Mark Koven there.  The sculptures he was showing were small in scale, and kinetic.  My favorite was a tower with a small generator that was powered by a turbine.  (I was reminded that Leonardo invented the turbine.) The turbine required the breath of more than one observer to turn it enough to power the dragonfly wings mounted at the top of the piece, which in turn evoked, for me, the flying machine drawings of Leonardo.  I also was captivated by the drawings of  Tamie Beldue, which were skillful and voluptuous, in graphite and watercolor, and floating under a layer of wax which gave them an extra aura of delicacy and intimacy.

My son Stewart and I had fun going to the Asheville Art Museum (www.ashevilleart.org)  which has its own special style– Very Asheville.  It’s in a glamorous Italian Renaissance style building in downtown that was the former home of the town library.  Now it houses a wonderful collection.  Lucky for me the work I’d seen there in April had all been replaced with other work so I got a larger notion of the museum’s holdings.  There are always plenty of surprises there, but the piece that sticks best in my mind is an abstract Maud Gatewood rendering of a tunnel (also very Asheville).  One sees the view framed by the tunnel.  Snow is falling and creates a pattern over the framed vista.  

I paid a quick visit to the Blue Spiral (www.bluespiral1.com), ate some great food, watched a guy dressed in a nun’s habit complete with a black miniskirt pedaling up Biltmore at a 45 degree angle on a red bicycle that had to be 10 feet tall (employing the same Attitude as the Wicked Witch of the West).  I heard the drum circle in the park.  Saw lovely bits of blacksmithing here and mosaic-making there… bits of random wall painting, and the basic urge of many creative souls to express themselves.  My refrigerator is now full of mountain apples from the Farmers’ Market.  And my head is full of  nature, color, and snapshots of focused energy made material .  Thanks Asheville.

I’m just back from a flying camping trip to the Asheville area.  Last night I sat by  a river reading until all the daylight was gone.  This morning I woke up in my dew covered tent the moment the sun appeared.  The day started with a walk around a lake.  The lake was nearly covered with blooming pink waterlilies.  In the small spaces where the lilies didn’t grow Canada Geese swam with their young.  The goslings had such an attitude–like any teenager– I know what I’m doing.  Back off.  I don’t need you.  Or maybe that was just my perception.  I was on a trip to take my youngest to orientation for college.  That was certainly the attitude in my home and in my car over the course of the last few days/weeks/months.  I could just feel it in the body language of the goslings.  Such insouciance.

The day before, I had removed the thorn from my side, dropping him off at college.  Feeling a good deal lighter, I treated myself to a trip back in time.  I embarked on my own little excursion,  to places where I had friends and happy times when I was in college.  It was a lovely, tender experience seeing those places through my older eyes.  Though much had changed there was, about those places, the same important quality of light, of freshness in the air.  The tree canopy is so huge and never-ending there that the air is always fresh. The air and the wildflowers are perhaps the best characteristics of that place.  At a stoplight a dragonfly landed on my windshield that was the biggest one I’d ever seen– probably 6 inch wingspan.  My immediate thought was “helicopter on the windshield”.

Among the highlights of my little journey was the pistachio muffin I enjoyed for breakfast, and a trip through the Blue Spiral Gallery.  I am always inspired by my trips through the Blue Spiral.  It is a destination as rich as any museum.  There I always see some of the best artists North Carolina can claim, and am entranced by the imaginative use of media, the interpretive leaps, the technical mastery.  Today’s mind-bending experience was a book-makers exhibition.  White gloves were provided for the viewer, so one could leaf through the complex volumes.  I was mesmerized by the craftsmanship, the raw edgy imagination in evidence.  I remember best the volume that included linocuts, mixed with rubber stamped images.  The key image was a wolf in a forest, all black white and gray.  Wolf pages were interspersed with other pages bearing flowing rhythmical images in color that appeared to be more like  water.  Had I thought that I would write about it later I would have taken more time to make notes to be more faithful to what I saw.  Instead I  have to write more intuitively and less factually.  I felt fed by what I saw in The Blue Spiral.  It’s a feast—three stories of wonderful art.  I always stop to look at the work by Will Henry Stevens, who  seems like our native John Marin, his eyes as captivated by the North Carolina landscape as my own.

Now I’m back in the Piedmont with a bit of the cool mountain breeze still blowing through my soul.  I hope tomorrow I will carry some of the energy of the last two days into the studio.