Stream behind the lake at Puivert

If you leave the lake at Puivert by the road that runs past the lakeside restaurant, you will come to a small ford across this stream, on a flat concrete bridge that's underwater much of the time. This day, back in April of last year, the concrete platform was high and dry and my friend Joan and I set up to paint there. It was a challenge - the coolness over the stream generated a strong wind, and our canvases were frequently in danger of blowing into the stream.

View across the Fields, Serre

If you take the D613 east out of Couiza, you will drive through a wonderland of places to paint. Serres is one of the small towns on this road. It's a particularly good spot for painting because there is a small, shady roadside rest area, complete with picnic tables, that offers this view across the road and fields, There are other painting subjects here as well - a small stream with lovely shadows from the trees in the rest area. A great place for a picnic as well as for painting. A freind and I stopped here one summer day and spent a pleasant hour or two sketching and painting. I was intrigued with the color of the fields of wheat in the foreground, and the soft deep greens of the trees and hedges in the farther field.

The Road to Rivel

This painting was done one April afternoon, on the corner of the road that heads from Ste. Colombe and Chalabre towards the small village of Rivel. The cherry trees had just come into bloom that week. The platane trees, though, are still in the leafless phase, looking very much like twisted torsos.

The Tower at Miraval

Across the street from our house in Ste. Colombe sur l'Hers is a large field, looking across the valley of the Hers river, to the hills on the other side of the valley. On one of those hills lies the town of Miraval, with a white water tower that catches the light beautifully just after sunrise. This painting was done from that field early one summer morning.

Plein Air in France

This blog is devoted to paintings that I have done en plein air, en plein air in France because that's where I have lived for the past five years. Painting en plein air in France is wonderful! The landscape is gorgeous, with post-card views just about everywhere. I live in the Aude department, which is situated on the Mediterranean coast, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and offers an extraordinary variety of scenery. Within a half hour drive, I can find stunning natural beauty: snow capped mountains, rolling farmland hills, river gorges; but also those man-made scenes that evoke the essence of the countryside, like vineyards with row upon row of grapes in ever changing colors, fascinating at every season of the year. There are also the the classic scenes: tall ,dark cedars, against stone walls, parasol pines silhouetted on hilltops and the country's most plentiful supply of castles, both ruined and restored. In addition to all that, there is the sea, the Mediterranean Sea. Here a painter can follow in the footsteps of the early French plein air painters, on the Côte Vermeil, the rocky coast near the Spanish border. Farther north along the coast are the long flat sandy beaches of Roussillon, bordered with inland ponds where flamingos can be found at the right times of the year.

As well as showing what a wonderful place France is for plein air painting, I'm interested in celebrating just how fascinating plein air painting is in itself. There is a special magic that happens when an artist paints from 'life' - not from sketches, not from memory, not from imagination, not from photographs. Those are all valid methods, but painting en plein air, 'sur le motif' creates a connection, a sympathy, a living link between the painter and the subject, a connection that is lost or at least diminished, when painting in any other way.

I have been doing plein air painting for some time, so some of the work that you see here is not new. But stick around - as soon as the weather warms up a bit there will be lots of new work as well!