Oil pencil, watercolor, and pastel pencil

11″x13″

2013

 

Oddly enough (to be as old as I am) I can recall onlyabout three times in my life when I was irrevocably touched, so to speak, by the place I was in and what was happening in it…..so that I can’t forget the place.

 One of those was during my first visit to St. Paul de Mausole, in St. Remy de Provence. It was beautiful.  I don’t, as a very general rule (and having visited more than anyone’s share of “Jane Austen’s House!” and similar literary/artistic shrines over the years) care much, one way or the other, about such places.

 

St. Paul de Mausole (which sits a mile or so outside St. Remy and is still is a functioning and very productive mental hospital) was just……different. It’s the only writer/artist “shrine” where I’ve ever found myself suddenly stopping (as we walked through the buildings and the gardens) and thinking “Oh….he was HERE….THIS is what he saw……he was HERE….and not so very long ago”) .

    

 Van Gogh was trapped there, of course (as was Albert Schweitzer, of all other geniuses, thirty or so years later. The room was closed-up after Van Gogh’s death, and Schweitzer was interned in that room as a foreign national during WWI…. and Schweitzer slept on the same iron bed and looked at the same view through the window in the left corner of this room 

   When Herve and I visited St. Paul de Mausole, the inevitable moment came when, despite the call of Art, the call of Nature spoke more forcefully to Dr. Herve. He went off in search of a public bathroom (this is, for so many reasons, just NOT a place where you’d pee in a corner of the garden). I was, at that point, feeling fairly overwhelmed by the whole place (this is definitely NOT something that happens to me a lot). I went off, walking quietly on that quiet morning, to look around outside the main building.

I walked into one of the small courtyard gardens and saw, from behind, an American (hard to mistake, given the logos on her t-shirt, baseball cap, and backpack) woman sitting on a bench.

She was sitting there….all alone, not moving, and very-softly singing Don McClean’s “Starry, Starry Night” to herself.

I heard her, started to say something (I didn’t want to spook her), stopped in my tracks, and I simply started silently backing-out by the way I’d come. I didn’t want to interrupt what was obviously a very special, intimate moment of hers.

Of course….that’s now my own favorite memory of the place….one of my favorite memories from all my travels, in fact.

 

Of course, the only song to go with this picture is this one……..go to: