Memories of Provence
This is not a snapshot album of views visited on distant holidays, but the mind’s flood of warm sparkling memories of whirling hot suns, ochre and rose coloured walls, tiny windows to keep in the cool and to keep out the mistral. The blue pools and the palms the hot grasses and the smell of lavender and wild thyme. Cherries everywhere, birds fly like angels through the hilltop villages with clusters of children’s building block houses a thousand years young and smelling of fresh pressed olives. Born in 1943 in Surrey, England the daughter of a passionate sunday painter whose studio was my magic playground. I was encouraged to experiment with colour and form before I could read and write. After my years at art college in Reigate my Anglo Italian roots drew me to the warmth of the south of France and the hot hills of the Vaucluse where I would spend long hot summers soaking up the sun and the heady odours of the wild herbs that flourish everywhere. I later moved and spent many years in the South West of France where the cognac vineyards and sunflower fields pattern and stripe the countryside sharing an abstract backdrop with the tight little stone village clusters.