L'aube de Cap d'Ail, 1990

L'aube de Cap d'Ail, watercolor on paper, app. 9x11 inches, 1990.

From the collection of Paul and Vreneli Farber

This painting is one of those long moments I'd've stayed in forever had you and all heavan been there instead of just your friend, our friend at the front door back home where it started with your $5000 for me in the Bell Market bag and the dog in Calistoga... what am I saying?

Who are you talking to?

I flew first class from Barajas and rode from Nice all the way to Cap d’Ail in a cab, in my seersucker suit, in those shoes like Dad hated, planning post cards from the Riviera and a brand new language for our old conversation about what's for dinner.

Here is the very view at noon.

I stayed in the poolhouse, whatever it was, no villa but better, down at the end of the promenade, away from the students and just below the German family who drank from their balustrade. Villa Thalassa. La Violetta.

It is my favorite watercolor.

You woke me very early, I'd never had such a dream of you, and I got up and dressed and walked out on to the terrace and set up my paint box along our rail and I painted this watercolor while the day came on, I can count the strokes, not many more than a hundred, some of them perfect, some of them awkward but all of them making a painting that is nothing but paper and the true color of a morning that even now, years later, somehow means more than anything I had, or will ever have to do with any of it, any of it at all... except that I made it.

Rinaldo and Darrio showed me everything from then on, asked the questions, looked at all the pages in the portfolio. They made an altar. The Spanish saint, the Italian angels, the tiles from Toledo, the candles in the evening, all dusted with his ashes. We ate salty fish, got happily drunk, then turned into Romans and pretended to understand pre-Rennaissance perspective and I painted the scene for them later, the dramatic scene with all of us in it from the evening of this morning, I am so very fortunate.

I went on with them and Mitch to Paris, then down to the duchy and Creysse-en-Lot, then I came home.

You met me at the airport.

Who met you at the airport?

The painting is about anything and everything you feel in a nice rosey sunrise.

It was shown at the Linn-Benton College Gallery in Albany, Oregon, and I am very glad the Farbers have it.