“Côte d’Azur” NFS
When my mother-in-law passed away a couple years ago now, she placed some money (aside from what was in the will) to each of her children and asked that it be used for travel. For Joy and I (especially as artists), this was an amazingly generous gift, and the choice of locations to travel to was a pretty easy decision to make: Provence. I say it was easy because so many artists (like Cezanne, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso) were drawn to this place and we wanted to see if Provence lived up to all the hype. It did.
As painters with an open art studio in Asheville’s River Arts District, we are constantly dreaming, creating, sketching out ideas (and throwing some of those ideas out) and painting the best of those ideas. And especially in the summer time, (our busy tourist season) it can become exhausting. By the end of July, I always start to feel the need to recharge. I absolutely love the fact that my job requires me to visually express my response to the natural beauty all around me. I’m mostly a landscape painter, and there is so much natural beauty here in western North Carolina. But as I said, by mid-summer I am beginning to feel drained. When we feel that way, we know we need to take some time and get out of the studio (if just for a day) and go hiking; to recharge that creative battery.
So when the opportunity arose for us to take an extended break from reality, we took it. For three amazing weeks, Joy and I wandered around Provence, exploring hill-top villages, bike riding, sketching, and sampling a lot of local bread, cheese and wine. :)
One of the absolute highlights for us though was to explore the Côte d’Azur (a fancy name for the French Riviera). I just think “French Riviera” sounds ridiculously snooty, whereas Côte d’Azur sounds exotic. It was. One of Joy’s goals was to swim in the Mediterranean (pretty much on her bucket list I think). So I read up on the best beaches in the area and it sounded like finding a small or secluded beach was impossible. But…
One of the days, I found what looked like a foot trail around a peninsula just east of Nice, France (where we were staying). There were no write-ups about it but on Google maps, you can zoom down and explore on “street view” to see what it looks like “on the ground”. It looked like a great place to spend the day on a six mile walk, so that’s what we did. What we discovered though was blue heaven. It was amazing. We found a little beach where we had our picnic lunch (all by ourselves) and then later, a little pebble beach for our first swim in the Mediterranean, again, completely alone. What I saw once diving down was unbelievable to me: the blue. I’d never seen water look like that. Never. I thought I knew what ocean water looks like…kind of a grey green color. But this was absolutely crystal clear, and when you dove down and looked out into the deeper water, I was met with the most intense blue I’d ever seen. The thought struck me “I HAVE TO PAINT THIS!” so I began diving down…over and over and over (probably 30 times or more), just trying to permanently engrave the colors into my head. And then, as soon as we got back state side, I began painting.
Today, that painting is done. And…it is going to hang in my home, because it (as closely as I can remember) depicts what I saw on that day in the south of France in the waters of the Mediterranean: perfection in blue.
