One more from today, and then I will stop. I have been sitting with the photos for an hour working out whether this one is mine to tell, and I have decided that it is, because she looked straight at the camera.
The gallery on the quai does not open on a Tuesday. Wednesday to Sunday, mid April to the end of September, and by appointment, and I knew all of that before I walked down there. I went anyway, because you can learn a great deal from a shut shop if you stand in front of it long enough.
Look what she does with a locked window. Paper butterflies strung on wires at four different heights so the whole thing moves when a truck goes past. Panels leaning behind them, gardens in blues and greens with white daisies punched through. And down on the sill, a compartmented wooden tray of colour blocks, worn right down in the middle of each one. That tray is not a prop. That is a tray somebody uses. She has put the working end of it in the window where you can see it, which is either very confident or very clever, and I suspect it is both.
And then she came out. Anne Virlange herself, on the pavement, in a dress with about nine kinds of flower on it, next to the panel with her own name across the top of it and her own line underneath. Peintre des rêves oubliés. Painter of forgotten dreams. I have no real idea how much of what I said to her landed, and I would not swear she got much of my accent either. She stood next to her sign and smiled at me anyway, and that is a kindness you cannot rehearse.
Thirty years she has been living off this. Six months of the year she paints, six months she shows, and she has been on that one stretch of quai since 2014. When I read that back later I had to put the phone down for a second. It is not the romantic version. It is a woman who worked out that the year has two halves and gave each half a job.
Walking back I found this bloke, folded into the gap behind a shutter that has not seen a paintbrush in fifty years. Terracotta and bone white flaking off in strips, and one purple neck in the dark of it. I stood in the road to get it, which is a thing I would not do at home.
Then, up the top end of the avenue de la Libération, two horses. Life size, both of them, built out of gears and chain and sprockets and what looks like the entire spanner drawer. The rearing one has a mane made of curled steel offcuts and it is doing exactly what a mane does, and whoever built it understood that the last thing to move is always the tips. I do not know who made them and there was nothing there to tell me.
Doors shut all over this town today, and I got more out of it than a Tuesday has any right to give. Arles tomorrow.
The famous Sunday market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, walked from twenty to nine while it was still cool. Rusted chairs, a canal hung with old linen, a wall of masks, and a lesson in selling from a leaflet.
Saturday’s list said one thing, go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and find paper. What I got first was a cliff with a castle stuck on top of it, a ruined garden, and a river that comes out of the ground and will not tell you where it has been.
An early loop around the town before the shutters went up, which turned into a dog in a doorway, a cat under the postcards and a brocante with nobody in it. By midday the lot of it was in blue biro.
