“Les Dentelles (Vaucluse, France)
Pencil, watercolor pencil, and pastel
2024 ( FOR SALE: $200. If interested in purchase, please email dterrydraw@aol.com or private message)
I don’t usually succumb to the post-Christmas blues&blahs, but I did two nights ago. Yesterday, I located the initial study-painting for this picture. Last night, I decanted (from Le Box de Franzia from the Food Lion), mais bein sur) a bottle of wine…….and me, it, and Morgan (who’s doing much better under his current regime of Hydrocodone-Homatropine), settled in for a FOUR HOUR BINGE of the movies “Jean de Florette” and “Manon de la Source”.
I got up this morning and, over five hours, happily finished this painting. So, I got my Provence fix, in the middle of dreary Tennessee winter (which just now, is a lot like Dublin……too cold for any comfort, muddy, drizzly, but not cold enough to snow).
Les Dentelles are a very dramatic, small range of mountains (all of which do, indeed, look like violently extracted teeth….the squeezed-out remains of the formation of Mount Ventoux). See the first comment for a picture of them.
Bulky, under-dressed German tourists and too-enthusiastic Americans like to climb up and down them, but I’ve never done more than to look at them while sitting on the back porches of friends in St. Remy or Vaison la Romaine, enjoying a two hour lunch before going off for a two hour nap. Dinner afterwards, but not until at least 9 o’clock.
It’s all a very enjoyably plan-for-the-day, particularly if everyone else in the house is intent on following the same schedule. Of course, it doesn’t happen every day (contrary to what Peter Mayles writes), but it does happen often enough to ruin the rest of normal life for one…..