The French Studio
In 2017, my family had a serendipitous meeting with a Luthier, a violin and cello maker, who offered us the use of his workshop in a small french town between the Pyrenees and the city of Toulouse. We'd long dreamed of working remotely and jumped at the chance.
It turned out we had the run of a former hotel a block from the town square in one direction, and the Arize River in the other. We had a 2-foot tall refrigerator, permission to fill the place with our flea market (vide-grenier) finds, and two balconies that we filled with potted flowers. The town had one bar on the square, two boulangeries, the greatest hardware store in the world, and a WWII air raid siren that signaled lunch every day at noon.
My architect husband, Jeff, set up a drawing table on the top floor. I set up a painting table on the second, and our daughters joined with guitars and projects of their own. And somehow, between exploring markets in neighboring towns and a string of stellar guests, we managed to get our work done. Jeff even started a book about his downtown Santa Barbara buildings. Remote work was working.
Time somehow slowed in this region of the world, where everything is closed on Mondays and people take the time for long lunches. We eventually met people and were treated to lively multi-course dinners that extended past midnight.
We returned in 2019 and again in the spring of 2022, and this time I turned a spare room into a studio. I was pondering what to paint when sunflower season hit, the world turned yellow and the answer was obvious.
Our town was surrounded by sunflowers of every shade and height, in patches and in rolling fields. In some areas you could drive more than a mile without a break in the yellow, and you could turn 360 degrees in fields with a view of only flowers.
Apparently farmers use every part of the sunflower, the heads for seed and oil, and then the drying stalks and leaves for animal feed.
I began a series of oil paintings with vivid-color underpainting. I kept things loose and worked to capture the changing color of the landscape and the heat of the air as days went from cloud-dotted blue to the pink of evening.
Tournesol is the french word for sunflower and one of my favorites, as it refers to the way the young flowers turn their faces toward the sun as it crosses the sky each day, before settling into facing east at maturity.
On July 20th, I’m releasing the Tournesol Print Collection, a series of 16 fine art prints on canvas from the finished oil paintings.
