Danielle her working journal from the European trip: sketchbooks, galleries, and the places that shaped the artists before us.
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.
Gordes was the plan. What I got instead was a weir at ten to nine, a dog holding an empty lane on its own, a pavement table of cyanotypes, and the place where the Sorgue splits itself in two.
A day trip to Arles in the middle of the Rencontres. The photographs are not all in the galleries, they are pasted flat on the walls, bolted into a ruined church, and stacked up beside a yellow cafe that has been shut for three years.
A late note from the same Tuesday. The gallery on the quai keeps its door shut on a Tuesday, which turned out not to matter at all, because the painter was out the front of it.
A Tuesday in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, which is the one day the sculpture foundation and the painter on the quai both keep their doors locked. So the day went to the working end of the art trade instead, and to two painters who stopped and posed at their own sign.
The afternoon of the same Tuesday, spent on rue Carnot and up an impasse off the rue de la Republique, where twenty makers share one room and everything in it carries a price.
Savoie is behind us. An afternoon in Avignon on the way south, on a street where the river was put to work six hundred years ago, and then on to the Sorgue proper for the next week.
Sunday was meant to be three galleries in one walk. Instead I went up a hill behind Chambéry, then north to a slot in the rock where the Sierroz comes down, and finished the day in a spa town with a locked museum and a wooden woman under a plane tree.
