Last September, on holiday, I went to France to visit Provence. This September some French came here. A tour group stopped by the Studios at 1716 Fourteenth on Tuesday afternoon.
Tom Drymon was their guide for the new Dorris Mae Gallery across the hall. After that, the group - about 18 middle age women and men from Nîmes - came into my workspace to learn about my painting and drawing.
I made succinct rhetoric, about which they gave positive feedback. Pointing to some unfinished canvases, they commented on the use of color as 'poetic'. Their guide was a French Canadian in his late 40's, who acted as a translator. As a group, they seemed genuinely interested in, and able to grasp, my aims and by-products.
Here are two of the questions they asked. Q: Has your work always had the same trajectory or did it change? A: It changed midway and there are two different periods of equal length in my development; Q: Was there a profession that you stopped in order to do this? A: No.
I mentioned that a large amount of my work is inspired by our relationship to place, and to space. There were some photos on my studio wall of places in the South of France that I hiked in years ago. I gladly brought their attention to them, by pointing my finger at a few shots of the Pyrenees.
Among the things that came out of the visit was the notion that we are all interacting with each other, even when I we don't see that interaction literally.
