Montrichard

A view of Montrichard, in the Tourraine, France, painted from the far side of the river. It was a nice day, and I was taking a break from watching the local kennel club's agility trials.

Behind the houses is the church of Saint Croix, a largely romanesque structure, although the tower is gothic. I made an etching of its facade, which you can see here. Above it, the fortified keep of the castle built by the irrepressible Foulques Nerra, the Black Falcon, whose wars vexed the region in the 11th century.

Near Sisteron

A few years ago I spent a few weeks cycling in Provence. A few day's ride up the Durance you may find the absurdly dramatic town of Sisteron, and adjacent (just across the river, in fact) to it this small burg. Beyond it, the beginnings of the Cottian Alps.

Gordes - in progress

I'm currently working on a large drawing of the complicated medieval hill town of Gordes, in Provence, France. I visited a few years back and was fascinated by the heap of interconnected buildings that rise almost organically from the yellow stone.

This is a slice of the drawing, showing the pencil lines and also the beginning of the inks.

Since the drawing isn't finished, I haven't scanned it yet - this is a snap from my tablet camera. I cleaned it up a bit, but there's still a lot of noise in the image.

Castle Mane, in Provence

On a warm day in May I cycled from the village of Gordes to the small town of Forcalquier, across the Luberon, and enjoying along the way some of Provence's more rugged terrain. Just before Forcalquier I passed through the small community of Mane.

From the point of view of someone interested in Medieval architecture, Mane has two things: the beautifully atmospheric Priory of Salagon, and the much less distinctive castle. I made sketches of both.

Forcalquier was effectively the capital of an independent state for much of the middle ages, and the castle at Mane guarded the approach to the city. It was seemingly built in the 12th century, and expanded many times thereafter.

The gothic church of St.Pierre in Avignon

It's the clocktower of the church of St.Pierre, in Avignon. I was there a few years back; I cycled along the south coast of France and around Provence, carrying a tent and my sketchbook. Avignon was among the most attractive - although not the most welcoming - of the cities I visited. Its chief merit, other than unreasonable quantities of medieval architecture, was delicious kebab and a very pleasant campsite.

There's really nothing like rolling out of your tent in the morning and seeing the Palace of the Popes across the river.

St.Pierre is not attached to the Palace of the Popes, but is more or less contemporary. It shares - except for the 16th c. facade - the same aggressive Provencal Gothic style of architecture. It's all sharp angles, spikes, and small beady windows. Not very friendly.

It is fun to draw, however.

The Pleasure of Ruins

One of the most interesting phenomenons in the history of architecture is the reuse and transformation of ancient ruins. For us, ruins are often attractive. People go out of their way to enjoy the suggestive aura of dilapidated castles and abandoned factories.

Our generally positive attitude towards ruins is a consequence of living in a rich society. In the past, people were more likely to dismantle a ruin for spare building material, like the Iraqi villagers who burnt a great Assyrian bull to render it into quicklime.

Religious buildings are a special case. For early Christians, Roman temples were an abode of demons. One way to deal with them was to build a church on top of the temple, as in the case of the basilica of San Clemente in Rome, built above an ancient mithraeum. Another approach was simply to consecrate the pagan building to a new patron: in this way the Pantheon (also in Rome) became the church of Holy Mary of the Martyrs.

After the end of the ancient religion, pagan temples no longer posed a threat. By the time of the Renaissance, "past ruin'd Latium" became an object of fascination to artists and scholars.


But the era before the Renaissance remains a mystery. In the 10th century, when Rome was a half-abandoned ghost town fought over by dimly chronicled warlords, a group of Greek monks settled down to live in the ruins of the temple of Mars Ultor ("The Avenger"). Why did they choose that spot? Did the God of War mean something to them, or was it just a convenient pile of stones?

Perhaps the ruins spoke to the monks. In the 5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris wrote of seeing "cattle not only lying in the half-ruined porticoes, but grazing beside altars green with weeds," language which suggests he took some pleasure in the view, even as he deplored it. And Paul the Deacon, in the 8th century, wrote "the dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs alone kept house... You might see the world brought back to its ancient silence; no voice in the field, no whistling shepherds..." Grim stuff, but beautiful words. Around the same time, an anonymous Anglo-saxon writer penned The Ruin, a meditation that begins:

The wallstone is beautiful
      but broken by fate.

The city is shattered
the old work of giants is falling...

Obviously some people were enjoying the sight of the ruins, even if they didn't go to the 18th century extreme of building fake ones. We still did this in the 20th century, of course, for example at the Guildwood in Toronto.


All this is leading up to a picture of my own, of course:

This is the ruin at Chateau-Bas, in Provence. No one knows to what god the temple was dedicated. What we do know is that at some point, probably in the 11th century, somebody built a small Christian chapel adjoining the ruins of the temple, from which the stones were taken. The temple is now a wreck, but its columns still stand, and it must have been even more impressive when the chapel was built. Today the chapel is dedicated to Saint Cézaire, presumably Caesarius of Arles. We have no way of knowing whether this was the case originally, or who built it, or why they chose the spot they did.

The drawing was done in pencil, in the early afternoon, during a bicycle ride from Cadenet to Salon-de-Provence. It was a pleasant idyll, sadly interrupted by an eruption of kindergarten children. As the teacher said to me as they approached, "Your peaceful solitude, it is over."

L'Abbaye de Fontfroide

A view of Fontfroide, an old abbey near Narbonne, itself a provincial town enlivened by some beautiful architecture but depressed by dust, heat, and a rather medieval sense of xenophobia.

The abbey's name, which means cold spring, explains its presence in an otherwise bleak almost-desert of bare rocks and low, tough, vegetation. It's a beautiful landscape, but an uninviting one. The route from Narbonne took me through a Roma encampment, an old quarry, and past a mysterious stone fort.

For those that are interested in things medieval, the abbey stands out in the history of persecution. It was a monk of Fontfroide, Peter of Castelnau, whose murder provided the pretext for the Albigensian Crusade, and throughout the Cathar era the abbey served as a centre of Church orthodoxy.

One of its abbots, Arnaud Nouvel, would serve as papal legate in the trial of the templars, but also found the time to protect the rich and powerful against accusations of heresy. A nephew of Nouvel, Jacques Fournier, was also an abbot, and eventually went on to become Pope Benedict XII at Avignon. He was an unrelenting inquisitor, efficient administrator, and an adornment neither to church nor humanity.

Fontfroide lost three-quarters of its tenants during the Black Death, and did not recover until the 17th and 18th centuries, when new buildings were added in the elegant classical style of the period. The monks fled during the revolution, but the abbey's location saved it from harm, and it was refounded by Cistercians from Sénaque in 1858. Prior to the dissolution under the 1901 Law of Congregations, the final abbot of Fontfroide, Père Jean, acquired a saintly reputation.

In 1908 the symbolist artist Gustave Fayet, together with his wife Madeleine, purchased Fontfroide at public auction. There is a story that they wanted to preserve the abbey from the rapacity of such American collectors as George Grey Bernard, who did succeed in taking large chunks of the nearby monasteries Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa and Saint-Guilhem-le-Desért across the Atlantic, where they formed the nucleus of the Cloisters Museum in New York.

In any case, Gustave Fayet used the abbey as a private painting studio, and also lent it out to his friends, most notably the great printmaker Odilon Redon. It remains in private hands to this day.

iPad paintings: Art in the Age of Mechanical Transportation

Tarragon took the train to Paris the other day. The trip took far longer than scheduled, due to a "fatality on the tracks." French transit service announcements are so blunt.

In any case, the gendarmes cordoned off the tracks, thus immobilizing a long line of trains between Paris and the channel. There was nothing for Tarragon to do but make pictures of the view outside the train window.

This is the first one:

And here's another. The train began to move again as he was making it. You can almost see the acceleration in the picture.

Both pictures were made on an iPad, using the Brushes app.

By the light of the Eurostar

Art in the age of mechanical transportation allows for some interesting variations. Tarragon is today in Paris, sipping mulled wine in the Tuileries, so here are some French landscapes he has recently painted, inspired by views glimpsed from the window of the Eurostar.

They are small oil paintings, eight by ten inches, and were recently on display at The Other Art Fair in London, England. Some other paintings by Tarragon from that venue can be seen here.

Montaubon

Some years ago I visited the small, russet-coloured town of Montaubon. My objective there was to visit the Jean-Dominique Ingres museum. It was a disappointment. Its contents - donated by his widow to his hometown - consist of the leavings of his studio and various other bits and pieces he was unable to sell.

None, in short, of the fabulous portrait drawings that make up his most interesting body of work. Nor any of the great paintings either.

But the trip was not a waste. Just a bit north of Toulouse, Montaubon is likewise built entirely from the pinkish-red local brick, and is quite beautiful. My favourite spot was the place de ville, a square courtyard completely enclosed by a double arcade that lent it a homey, almost claustrophobic, appeal.

A good place to hide from the afternoon sun, and one in which people were constantly appearing and disappearing, as if by magic, behind the many columns.

I made this etching of it at the Open Studio in Toronto. It's approximately nine by six inches, and printed on 140lb. Somerset cotton-rag paper, in an edition of forty. My main interest in the composition was in capturing the sharpness of the afternoon sun.

Château de Lourmarin

Castles are one of those things that should be interesting. Evocative, mysterious, foreboding. Things like that.

But they speckle the landscape of Europe like ants at a family picnic. Inevitably, some of them are boring.

The Château de Lourmarin is one of the boring ones. Despite its location in one of France's most ostentatiously charming villages, there is really nothing engaging about it. It has a vague association with King Rene of Provence - who was an intriguing man - but he had many castles, most of which are more distinguished than this one.


For those who like medieval things, I should note that it was founded in the 12th century to guard the pass between the greater and smaller Luberon massifs. But the oldest extant fabric dates from 1475, and the renaissance embellishments from the 1520s. There was a further, extensive, restoration in the 1920s, on the part of one Robert Laurent-Vibert, a cosmetics magnate, who perished in an automobile accident before he had time to enjoy his private castle. These days it's a museum. I visited a few years back.


There is another drawing of the castle, with attendant village, here.

Sur la Route de Serrelles

Several years ago I lived in the French countryside near the dainty town of Montrichard, itself a small burg 30 minutes south of the mid-sized city of Tours. Although the area is afflicted by subdivisions as swiftly and shoddily built as anywhere else, plenty of the local vernacular architecture survives.

The house I lived in dated from the eighteenth century, and had stone walls a full foot thick. Likewise the house in the picture, which was some twenty metres further down the Route de Serrelles. Those walls, incidentally, provided more than adequate protection against German artillery during the Franco-Prussian war.

A cursory glance at the roof of the second building in the picture will demonstrate that this watercolour was never finished. I was summoned, I think, by a gin and tonic. I don't suppose I'll ever return to complete it.

Saint Croix

Another church, this time in France. It's the ancient parish church of the town of Montrichard, a romanesque structure tucked under the towering castle erected by Foulques Nerra, the Black Falcon, a man so entertainingly evil he deserves his own novel (or two) plus a mini-series. The castle is 11th century, and no doubt the original church was too, but what you see in the picture probably dates from a century later.

It got its name (Église Ste-Croix) from a fragment of the true cross brought back from Jerusalem by Foulques Nerra, on one of his three pilgrimages to the city. He had a lot of repenting to do.


The picture is one of the first etchings I ever made, back in 2001 at the Ontario College of Art and Design. It's quite small, about four by six inches.

Chateau Barben

I apparently sketched this - from my bicycle - at 3:16pm, on May 18th. In 2004, if I recall correctly. It's a castle in Provence which I passed on my way to Salon-de-Provence from Cadenet in the Durance Valley. I dimly recollect a long ride amidst Roman ruins and the prevailing scents of lavender and rosemary. With, perhaps, a hint of labdanum. A good day.

Re: the castle, my notes say:
"original castle prior to c.1000, Property of St.Victor [a monastery in Marseille]. Acquired by King Rene, who sold it to the Forgin family, who still own it? They enlarged it in the 14th and 17th century, [but] the round tower was enlarged after the 1909 earthquake."

Which is clearly wrong, since King Rene was not alive in the 14th century. I must have meant the 1400s, and in fact the sale took place in 1474. Wikipedia (en Français) tells me that the same family does indeed still own the castle, although not, sadly, what they're currently doing with it.

Forcalquier

A smallish community in Haute-Provence. I had been reading about the history of the early counts of Provence, in which the place figures large, and was looking forward to seeing the town. But sadly its medieval portions have been a victim of the succeeding centuries. All that remains of the famous castle is a (very ornate) 19th century chapel. The cathedral in this picture, at least, is a genuine 12th century edifice.

It was a lovely area for cycling, however.

un paysage

A small pastoral (literally!) landscape. Something like this could be almost anywhere, but as it happens it's in Touraine, France, a short distance from the small town of Montrichard.

This kind of bucolic vista isn't really my thing; I was feeling experimental that day.

Lourmarin

Back in France: a view of chateau and church in the charming - albeit touristy - village of Lourmarin. It's Provence at its most ostentatiously pretty, which even if you like pretty things (and I do) can be a bit hard to take.

It's one of those places in which none of the sights (including Camus' grave) are of much individual interest. Together, however, they make for a nice day trip.

Blois

Looking up at the Cathedral of St.Louis in Blois, France. The cathedral, a 17th century building graced with charming modernist stained glass, is not the most interesting or impressive sight in Blois. But the confined view up the hillside stairway is one of the most striking.

The chateau of Meyrargues dominates the community of the same name, although why anyone should bother to dominate such a tiny place is beyond me. The castle itself is quite beautiful, chiefly because of its vivid yellow colour. Not visible here, of course.

These days it's a  4-star hotel. Perhaps one day...

It's in Provence, just south of the Durance. I cycled through it en route to the (rather lovely) campsite at Cadenet.

Montrichard

For a few years I used to spend a fair bit of time in Montrichard, a quietly provincial French town a bit south of Tours. Periodically, I ventured out to draw the architecture. This is a renaissance gateway plus house adjacent to the ruins of the medieval castle.

It's a drawing in sepia ink overlaid with watercolour. Not a technique I used too often. The usual advantage of a dark underdrawing - the deep value of the shadows is already laid in for you - is here lost.