The main square in St.-Aulaye

Hello Friends, I’m back from France and have just downloaded my pictures of the country and the Pastels en Perigord Salon.  When we drove into town, we found that the streets were festooned with rows of plastic flowers everywhere! Really amazing.  It had to do with a 50 year celebration of l’Occitane.  But there were also banners for the show and an upcoming music festival this weekend. It’s a small town but quite amazing. We arrived last Friday night as they were finishing with the show hanging.  Philippe Caillat (aka Pastels Philippe) is the person who seems to manage it all. He had created a small scale model of the show and had attached small versions of the paintings to each wall in the model. Sorry I didn’t get an image of this!  The show is a maze of white walls. Each artist has 3 paintings and each painting has a light above it. The glass is a real problem, however, particularly for pictures. When they were done we all went behind one of the walls and feasted on melon with prosciutto, pate and bread, pizzas, cheeses, and ice cream bars, washed down with a sweet strawberry wine!  Quite French.

The quality of the show is very high, from the featured artist–Tony Allain of Cornwall–to the jurors and other invited artists.  The juried artists were also very good and I was pleased with our selections.  There were many different styles, from the very loose and gestural, to the very tight and realistic.  I think my two favorites were Tony Allain (gestural) and Aurelio Rodriguez (amazingly realistic!).  I will include a selection of paintings from the show in this post and will include Aurelio’s Sunday morning demo in the next.

As a landscape painter who loves France, I was surprised at how few landscapes there were of the French countryside. Having just looked at my 560+ photos and seeing MANY possibilities, I’m amazed that the French artists don’t do more with it. I guess the Impressionists did it all???  Still …

So here are some of the paintings.  The Achard is very loose, the Gaben-Laurie is left unfinished (ignore the light spots from the glass!) and the Rodriguez is hyper-realism!  I could never do that plastic wrap!!!  But I decided that if I wanted to be more like anyone in the show it would probably be Allain. I loved the way he was able to put in a bright piece of orange to say light on a roof, and a few pieces of white for the clothes on the line. His strokes are perfect.

After the “vernisage” (opening) many of the artists, jurors, and their spouses all went to Aubeterre sur Dronne for dinner outside under the stars.  John and I quickly got a table, which became the anglophon table!  We had Irish, English, and Americans all able to converse.  It was quite lovely.

Two paintings of surf by Nicole Guion-Stamatakis

Paysage du Tarn, Joel Achard

La petite reveuse, by Helene Gaben-Laurie

Wash Day, Tony Allain

From the Mediterranean, Aurelio Rodgriguez Lopez

Two of my paintings at the ArtHamptons show

Happy July 4th!  It’s a cool, overcast day with showers promised, so I’m getting things done after a week and a half up north.  We spent five nights in the Hamptons, in the town of Hampton Bays, while my work was on display at ArtHamptons in Bridgehampton.  We had beautiful weather and spent a lot of time touring around.  I was at the opening reception on Thursday night and spent a little time at the end on Sunday, but otherwise stayed away.  Only two of the six paintings I brought were on display at any one time. You can see the small wall that I had in the picture, and the size of the accompanying work!  The other paintings in this photo are fairly typical of what was on display.  Most of it left me fairly cold.   Mine were the only pastels in the show, and there were very few other landscapes.  Surrealism is really big! Given my proclivity to really beautiful paintings, this was not my kind of show!  But I did sell one painting–Shore House with Loosestrife.  I didn’t see a single gallery that I thought would be worth approaching.  I won’t be doing this again but it was an interesting experience.

Shore House with Loosestrife

Typical seascape in the Hamptons

One thing that has always intrigued me about Long Island is the area of Shinnecock Hills, which the painter William Merritt Chase painted so beautifully in oil and pastel. Fortunately, there is a wonderful show of Chase at the Phillips Gallery with many pastels, and a whole room of Shinnecock landscapes. (His small box of Girault pastels is also on display–a real treat!) He taught at the summer art school there, and his paintings are filled with sunny skies, beautiful clouds and grassy hills with women dressed in white.  Unfortunately, most of what was once Shinnecock Hills is now a humongous golf course.  But one can still get the sense of the place. The photo I’ve included is from a wildlife refuge on Great Peconic Bay.  Here is a website that includes all of Chase’s work: http://www.william-Merritt-Chase.org.

On the way home, we visited the Hill Stead Museum in Farmington, CT, just west of Hartford. This is a WONDERFUL place!  It’s the home of a wealthy couple who bought impressionist paintings at the turn of the century. The house was designed by their daughter, an architect, and everything is exactly as it was.  The collection includes two wonderful Degas pastels and two of Monet’s haystack paintings that literally glow.  On the wall by the stairs are wonderful etchings and drawings by Whistler and others.  I loved looking at one of the Degas pastels–a nude with wash basin.  Beautiful texture and combination of layered pastel with cross hatched strokes.  I noticed this in the Chases as well.  It’s something that I want to experiment with and will include in my fall classes.

So now I am preparing for our last major trip–France!  I am very much looking forward to this trip as I will get to meet an old acquaintance  from high school, who lives in France and paints in pastel, as well as meeting many European pastelists and seeing the great show in St. Aulaye.  We will be on the western edge of the Perigord region, just north east of Bordeaux.  We are staying out of cities completely and look forward to seeing the French countryside and beautiful towns.  I’ll be sure to take a lot of photos and will report back!  Have a wonderful summer.