Sunday Sketches

Sunday in the Haute Vallée is market day. Just like in the old days, people flock to Espéraza from the surrounding villages, to buy fresh produce and catch up with friends. Today, the day before Halloween, there was a calm, unhurried atmosphere and the sun shone, though more softly than in the heat of summer. For the first time in the seven years I have been coming to this market, I dared to sit sketching amid all the activity. 

   

In the afternoon, it was still warm enough to sit on the bench opposite Fa café and do a watercolour sketch. The parasols are folded down for the winter now and the trees on the hillside behind are just starting to turn colour.

Riverside Houses

My regular Tuesday evening sketching hour this week found me down by the river Aude in Quillan. I sat on a bench and drew the houses on the opposite side of the river. It was probably the last opportunity I will get this year to sketch outside while my daughter is at dance class. It had been a glorious day but the sun had already sunk below the mountain by the time I started and there was a definite autumn nip in the air. On one of the balconies, a man sat sipping his aperitif and was briefly joined by his wife before they both withdrew into the warmly glowing interior of their home. A faint whiff of wood smoke from the first fires of the season hung on the air.        

No Entry

This month's Virtual Paintout took me, via Google Street View, to Sardinia which, like last month's location New Orleans, abounds with the colourful facades and wrought iron balconies I am so fond of painting. What really interests me is the shadows, their shapes and tones. Edward Hopper said: "Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house". I feel very much the same.

Quillan rooftops

Found a great viewpoint for my sketching this evening: Quillan castle, high on the hill where you can look down on the red rooftops and the Aude river flowing through.

The Big Easy

Having visited New Orleans years ago, I was inspired to participate in this month's Virtual Paintout, an online art challenge hosted by American artist Bill Guffey. The idea is to cruise around the month's featured city in Google Street View and paint a scene that takes your fancy. The view I chose reflects my enjoyment of the architecture of The Big Easy, with its wrought-iron balconies and colourful facades, and the interplay of light and shadow.

Ceci n'est pas un piment

The upcoming group exhibition at the Espace d'Art is on the theme of Surrealism, Dada and Fluxus. My painting is a take on René Magritte's infamous Ceci n'est pas une pipe which features a realistic rendition of a pipe suspended in mid-air with those words painted underneath. The idea being that, rather than an actual pipe that you can fill with tobacco and smoke, it is in fact a mere representation of a pipe.

As followers of my blog will already know, chillies have recently become a favourite subject of mine. So while it is not a particularly original idea (just search Google Images for Ceci n'est pas...), I thought it was rather neat that the French word for 'chilli' starts with the same two letters as 'pipe' which gave me the added dimension of a play on words.

Acrylic on canvas board, 41x33cm 

Misty Beach

A sea mist drove us off the beach and onto the boardwalk at La Franqui, from where I did a quick watercolour. It wasn't quite as deserted as I have depicted it but I'm not very good at people so I decided to leave it.