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.
The other half of the Arles day, the half spent indoors. Zhang Lanpo’s giant in a Chinese cliff, a Japanese photographer’s children’s book about a dog, and three coloured rectangles that taught me something.
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.
In a town that sells everything, I went into the collegiate church, and found somebody had propped three modern abstracts up against a seventeenth century altar.
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.
Saturday in Chambéry. Four cast iron elephants with no back ends, a cathedral ceiling that only pretends to be carved stone, and an afternoon in the square drawing two blokes and a dog that had given up on the heat.
Out of Italy and into Savoy, where the flags change but the white cross does not. A first afternoon in Chambéry, the capital Turin replaced, full of shuttered lanes and passages that go straight through the buildings.
