The View from the Tranquil Cottage

The View from the Tranquil Cottage, 2002, acrylic on board, 2x4 meters.
From the collection of Ron Notto and Darrell Andre

From Three Views: Watercolors from Home and Abroad...

The view from LaBoissière is very broad and very deep. Its breadth from north to south exceeds the range of human peripheral vision; it cannot be wholly seen without turning the head. The furthest depth of the view, from the terrace, from the sale à manger, from the pool, or from my bedroom windows stretches in receding planes 50 miles into the east, where, with the naked eye, the ancient, ducal, hoary and mostly renaissance Château de Biron appears as a grain of sand on the horizon. Within these extremes is a landscape of lush romantic splendor in perfect tandem with the best features of the Classic Ideal, as if Claude Loraine had conspired with Constable to balance nature, to set it straight for the poet and the painter. It is a man-made, and very human landscape. Below the potager and the lawn is the hedge, behind is the road and then a field of hay. Poppies bloom in May and June, in vermilion. The coquelicots, the red-orange poppies, shout loudly of Claude Monet. They, and he, are everywhere. There is a line of poplars at the end of the close field; the poplars shade a source, a spring that once laundered sheets and togas in the Second Century. The spring fills a pond; the pond is stocked with two dozen Koi swimming in transparent water. Oak groves wander off in trapezoids. There is more hay, fallow plots here and there, more grapes, more corn, and wet fields of viridian that become the primary yellow of sunflowers in July. Healthy cattle, Blondes d’Aquitaine, raised for the table, punctuate the fields with soft ochre. Hamlets and villages lie across the panorama; Bernac with its church and single cypress; Montbazillac, twenty miles away, overlooking the valley of the Dordogne; Puyguilhem where the Roman city stood; the house tops of Castillionnès. It is farmland, paysage, in vast expanse and it stretches away to the South and distant dreamy thoughts of Cahors, Toulouse, Matisse and the Mediterranean.