End of summer

The fields around the village are dotted with rolls of hay, evoking the end of a season. These always remind me of Monet and his numerous studies of haystacks at different times of day and in various seasons, colors changing from golden to peach, to purple and blue. It's true that depending upon the moment, the colors and length of shadows change dramatically with the light.

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Last week I gave a three-day art course to Veronique and her son Barnabé, who were in town visiting our neighbors Anne and Christine.

Barnabé is not quite six but already a prolific artist, spending hours a day making pictures and inventing elaborate stories to accompany them. Veronique is an art historian. I felt I had to come up with a project that would be varied enough to be interesting to both of them, engaging the imagination of a child while not being too basic for his talented parent. I chose to have them make a book which would be a keep-sake of their vacation in Montmirail. We made several pages trying out various image-making techniques. This is a leaf print made with watercolor. Directions here.

We also made monotypes, created by painting with water color onto acetate sheets, allowing the paint to dry thoroughly and then running the plates through a press with dampened etching paper.

I discovered a new technique I had never tried before. I loved the results. This is called a gelatin print, which is taken off a bed of hardened gelatin. Directions here. It yields two prints from one ink application and leaf/flower arrangement. A positive/negative, like these,

And a more painterly one. I really enjoyed this technique and I'm anxious to play with it a little more.

We also made cyanotypes and vegetable stamp prints. I thought that Barnabé might have encountered some of these methods at school, but in fact they were all new to him.

He especially enjoyed any of the projects that involved turning the big wheel of the press. We made some beautiful blind emboss prints and these seemed very interesting to Barnabé.

There were various other pages as well. Scraffito, plaster paper drawings and more. We bound them into a book which we covered with cloth after adding a silk screen embellishment on the cover. All this we bound with a Japaneses stab binding.

The hours rolled by very quickly. I think it was fun for them to discover many different ways to put images on paper and then to put them all together in a little souvenir album.

 ***

We are leaving for a couple of weeks vacation in the mountains of Slovenia with our family. I'll be sitting by a river somewhere with sketchbook in hand. In early September I'll post photos here. Meanwhile I leave you with this rather romantic photo of our chambre jaune, taken this morning as the late summer sun streamed in through the windows.

Visit our Bed and Breakfast in France

Days of Wine and Roses

Dreaming of sunny days, I played with this image I took in Barcelona last year.

Our spring is a bit unpredictable this year! The sun plays hide and seek, the rains they come and go. One has to profit from the periods when the sky is blue and the air is warm, to race out to the garden and smell the roses, which are in abundance at the moment.

On the terrace are three kinds of climbing roses, sharing one trellis. They are all in glorious bloom. The light pink one was a gift from our local wine merchant, Roland. I don't know the variety, but it's a little like a Cecil Bruner in that it grows vigorously, smells, wonderful and blooms a single time during the year. The purple is a charming ancient variety called Veilchenblau. The third is a Ghislaine de Feligonde, a special rambling rose which produces beautiful blooms throughout the season.

Of course our mutabilis rose is the real star. It blooms continuously in all the warmer months and displays several colors on the same plant, as the blooms take different shades as buds, mature blooms, and then as faded ones. Last weekend we stood on the terrace with our clients, all doctors from Paris, and enjoyed it together. It's a bit of a show-off.

Our yellow rose on the front of the house took a bit of a beating in the cold of last winter. We have had to prune it back considerably. But still it is putting out a profusion of blossoms.

In our larger garden, we have an entire bed of rose plants of various varieties. Rick called me over to take a look at this beauty and pronounced it "perfect." It was at that moment, which lasts so temporarily, where its form and color are at their ideal. The sun captured it and made it seem to glow.

If you really love roses, you should visit Rose Notes, a blog by one of my friends, Carolyn Parker. She is the expert and her images are spectacular.

Skies have been dramatic and changeable.

The moon has been full. And of course Venus transited the sun. We couldn't see it, as it was cloudy that day.

It's been such a long time since I've taken you for a walk in our woods. It's such a lovely time of year for a stroll under the trees.

I have been working quite a lot on various art projects. My image "View From Inside" was chosen to hang in an international print show in Richmond, VA. It's the small one just to the right of the sculpture. Rick framed it between two pieces of glass. I like the way it looks floating in its frame.

Here's a sign from St. Suzanne, a beautiful old medieval village not far from us. It's for a storefront where sacred art is exhibited. I find it very amusing how voluptuous this nun is!

Week 18: A Cup of Coffee, a Wild Mushroom and the Illuminated Forest Path

The weather is not a central topic of conversation when you live in California, where I grew up. There, of course, weather is fairly predictable and unchanging. I have always enjoyed the conceit in LA Story, where Steve Martin, as weatherman, tapes his transmissions several days in advance to be broadcast later. I think the last couple of years in California have been much less "normal," but still, I doubt that the weather has become an important subject when people get together there. In our region of France the weather is a part of almost every conversation. There is a saying here: "If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." It's absolutely true that our weather changes quickly and dramatically. We can have a taste of three or four seasons in the space of a few hours. Thus I often imagine some meteorological observation as a fitting opening paragraph to my blog posts, as it is much on my mind and in my daily encounters.

This week has seen bright sunny warm days, as well as heavy rainfalls and really chilly moments. There was an especially golden full moon. A harvest moon. Autumn officially has begun. We ordered our heating oil and called a local farmer to deliver several cords of wood, ready for our four working fireplaces (we have nine total in the house) to be ready once the weather makes a sharp turn towards the cold. It hasn't yet, but we've had a few hints. We're at that transitional point. It's a charming, if achingly temporary moment of the year. Surely one of the most beautiful.

September is one of the most popular months of all the year for French weddings. We have been full every weekend with a series of local marriages. It keeps our business humming right through the month, even after the holiday-makers have taken the kids back home.

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Another thing which keeps our business going are friends of friends. Buzz and Ginger who stayed with us earlier in the season, have referred several people to us. We were happy to welcome Mina, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last week. She stayed with us for three nights and was a lovely presence.

Mina has a business making gluten-free products. She is so allergic to gluten that any consumption is actually life-threatening. Apparently that means not only avoiding bread and flour, but lots of other processed products. She was in France as a consultant to a company in Paris. Maison Conti was the rest-stop before the work. I cooked meals for her, but she brought her own breakfast pastry. She let us try it, and it was really fantastic!

Next week we welcome some other friends of Buzz and Ginger.

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James and his boyfriend Adric stayed with us for several days this week. When we first moved to France, James lived in Paris and was going to school there, so I had my whole tribe in one place. Our family gatherings were frequent. For the last three years James has been living in San Francisco, where he just completed his MFA in playwriting. His next big adventure is in England. We call him our perpetual student. He is now undertaking a PhD at Warwick University. Adric will be studying African Theatre in London and will receive an MA at the end of the year.

There is certainly a passage that occurs when one becomes a grandparent. Another must surely be when the youngest child finally takes all his boxes of stuff out of your garage and moves away with them! We have carried James' 12 boxes of miscellany across the seas and moved them from one place to another. But now there is a big hole in our garage where once the cardboard boxes were stacked high! That really seems quite strange. He loaded them all into the rental truck, but couldn't resist unpacking just one box of posters and photos for a walk down memory lane.

While the "boys" were here they requested an etching course. I had such a good time with them! Adric is an artist but James has usually avoided art. He told me as a child that he thought I worked much too hard as a graphic artist. I guess he felt he equated art with work, not fun. Neither of them had done printmaking before and they both loved the technicality of it. I taught them three techniques, soft ground, hard ground and aquatint, which they used on different areas of one plate. Their results were wonderful. They seemed to be pleased and talked of future projects.

I always do a demo plate, but very rarely print it, since it's just for showing techniques to students. But in this case I rather liked the image that emerged. This is a soft and hard ground combination which I inked up and printed.
 

I added an aquatint, by way of demonstrating the technique. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the effect, but I etched and printed it anyway. As expected, I prefered the image without the tone, but it was still interesting in its own right.

It's not easy to go back once you've added your aquatint, so I let all that be and started over on a slightly larger plate and created a whole new image. I call it Boy in a Plaid Shirt.

There were days that simply cried out to be enjoyed outdoors this week. We took a walk in the woods one early afternoon and enjoyed the quality of autumn light as it played among the branches.

Adric noticed some wild mushrooms which reminded me that this is mushroom gathering season. The French love to take to the woods this time of year and collect edible mushrooms by the basketfull. Most of the people we know are experts at identifying them and soups, salads and main dishes filled with wild mushrooms are served up on many tables this time of year. When I was at university, and lived in Oregon, I took a field guide and went out in the woods behind our house to identify mushrooms to bring home and cook. Those were the days before I read about an Asian family who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and found some mushrooms they recognized from back home, cooked them up into a sauce and then had to be rushed off to the hospital. The entire family lost one of their internal organs and barely survived. That local news story affected lots of other people I know and I don't think any of us has felt very safe with a wild mushroom ever since. Here in France you can bring a mushroom to the pharmacy and they will identify it definitively for you.

I have no idea if the ones we noted are edible of not, but I would be very reluctant to take the chance. Luckily our local grocer also sells wild mushrooms this time of year, and I'd just as soon let the experts do the gathering. I don't mind paying for them. They are wonderful and I have a very nice recipe for warm wild mushroom salad with curls of Parmesan cheese. It can only be made during a very brief time of the year when these delicacies are available.

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This week we received a coffee care package from our friends Wolfgang and Sabine, who I wrote about two weeks ago. While they were here earlier in the month, the conversation turned to coffee and we discovered yet another area of common ground (no pun intended). Coffee fanaticism. Wolfgang has a really gorgeous espresso machine and, like Rick, can't imagine a day that is not punctuated by cups of perfectly brewed coffee from ideally roasted beans.

When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we always bought our coffee at Peets, one of the first and finest European style coffee roasters in the United States. It was Mr. Peet, a Dutch man who opened his first shop in Berkeley in 1966, and taught the mega coffee founders of Starbucks how to roast. They were his employees at one time. The secret to good coffee is mostly in the roasting, at least if you have good beans to begin with. The trouble with Starbucks is that their volume is so huge that they are forced to buy the good, the bad and the ugly coffee beans in order to have enough for all the cups of coffee they brew. The coffee bean is a seasonal product, after all, and therefore the highest quality beans are limited. For the first year that we lived in France a friend in California sent us Peets beans every month. After being spoiled like that for so long, it was hard for us to adjust to life without really good beans. In our local area we could find nothing that approached what we were used to. Even in Paris, at one of the most well known suppliers in France, Café Richard, the beans are not at all the same. They are dry, which indicates that they've been roasted too fast. A really well roasted bean is greasy, and that oil on the bean's surface is responsible for the crema on the top of an excellent cup of coffee.

It is only within the last year that we had found a roaster in Le Mans who could approximate the coffee we had from Peets. Even I have become a coffee snob, and I know when the beans are inferior. There is a stale or bitter taste that lingers after a sip from a cup of coffee made from either inferior beans or beans roasted haphazardly.

Wolfgang told us about his coffee roaster in Munich, Caffé Fausto. To prove the point, he sent us a huge box of beans, four different roasts. Believe me, we have been particularly enjoying our mornings this week! The beans are every bit as beautiful as Peets, and perhaps even better, since some of the roasts are dark, like Peets (who roasts all his beans very deeply, slowly and for a long time, until they're almost black), and some are just a bit lighter, which I personally prefer.

A new refinement we learned from the Fausto literature is that it is also important, when blending coffee, to roast each type of bean separately and to put them together only after that. It makes sense that each type of bean would require different temperatures and times. They're not all the same size, for one thing. Most roasters don't take the time and trouble.

Wolfgang also introduced us to a crazy YouTube channel Seattle Coffee Gear, that offers endlessly fascinating tutorials on coffee making. It's well worth checking out if you are an addict.

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Week 14: Garden Visit

The Queen's Chair, a giant natural sculpture on display at Chaumont-sur-Loire

The rhythm of life has changed dramatically as people are beginning the rentrée (the reentry). There is a hint of Autumn in the air, we find ourselves reaching for sweaters, and the days are shorter, a few leaves are thinking about turning colors. Fewer meals are served on the terrace as the beginnings and ends of days are cooler. Less people arrive on the Place, the castle is only open now on weekends. It's time to order the firewood and get the fuel tank filled. Other signs of the end of the season: Celine, the hairdresser is back. Rick and I no longer look so scruffy. Anne and Christine suddenly reappeared and their shutters are open again after weeks of being firmly shut. They have been soaking up the sun on a Greek Island. And speaking of islands, Quinn and family are somewhere in the Adriatic as I write this, enjoying "the Mediterranean as it once was" (as the Croatian tourist board slogan would have it).

We had several quiet days this week, although we weren't completely free. We did have some Russians staying with us for a couple of nights. Two families, each with two children. The fathers are cousins. Those days were not quiet at all as the four children were all under the age of 8. One family now lives in New York and the other in Israel, so they meet in Europe during the summer and spend time together. Monday was Adi's birthday, she was the oldest girl, turning 7 at Maison Conti. Her father got up early to drive to Vibraye for cake, as Monday is the day our own boulangerie is closed. He arrived back at the house about 9am just as everyone was coming down for breakfast. He was carrying two huge boxes of large and small cakes and numerous pastries of every description. Adi showed her wisdom by asking to delay the cake consumption until the evening. I was impressed by her restraint. They had a long day visiting the Loire Valley and then returned to the house. We had set them up a big festive table in the dinning room and they celebrated into the night. 

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We profited, as they say over here, from a few days without responsibilities, and did some touring ourselves. Most of this post is devoted to a garden visit we made early in the week. We have been hearing about Chaumont-sur-Loire from Georges. From June to October each year numerous landscape architects are invited to create imaginative gardens which all respond to a theme. The result is acres of fabulous exposition garden plots which are open to the public. Since this International Festival of Gardens is towards the end of its season, we were anxious to visit and discover what we've been missing. The festival was created in 1992 and is now world renowned.

We opted for the garden tour only, although one can purchase tickets to visit the château itself and the celebrated stables, which when built in the early 1800s were the most sophisticated and best-equipped in the world. The castle is in the château fort style, that is it was fortified to withstand attack. During the Renaissance, when wars were no longer fought at castle walls, buildings became much sleeker and delicate. Kings and nobles tried to convert these old, rather squat castles and added graceful Renaissance touches as they were able. The castle of Montmirail is an excellent example of that, as is Chaumont-sur-Loire. This particular château was purchased by Catherine de Medici who was queen of France from 1547-1559 and a very ruthless character (she was the author of the St Barholomew's Massacre, where thousands of protestants, guests at her own daughter's wedding, were assassinated). The king, her husband, Henry II was very much in love with his long-time mistress Diane de Poitiers and gave her the castle of Chenonceau, the most beautiful and famous château in the Loire valley. Upon the death of the king, Catherine forced Diane to trade Chenonceau for Chaumont. Apparently this was heartbreaking to Diane, but one can't feel too sorry for her. Chaumont-sur-Loire is really a stunning location.

The park is huge, with beautiful manicured lawns and gorgeous old trees and shrubs arranged to create breathtaking views from every angle.

One can walk for hours, (or better yet ride a bike) down well-tended paths that wander through seemingly endless woodlands. Although we didn't see a gardener the whole day, there must be a small army of them as every blade of grass is meticulously trimmed and every tree perfectly manicured.

The vistas over the Loire River are spectacular. We enjoyed watching an art class put their impressions down on paper.

Along one pathway a row of basket chairs were arranged for enjoying the view. I loved the design.

It was a splendid day to enjoy the exposition gardens. There were hundreds of people there at the same time, but the grounds are so immense that we never felt crowded. Twenty-four exposition gardens were created to respond to this year's theme Body and Soul. 

One of my personal favorites was the tea garden, complete with a wall of tea cups at the entry. Each afternoon tea is actually served in the porcelain cups in the charming little garden behind.

The garden itself was a cottage garden filled with a jumble of flowering plants.

Each garden had a panel at the entry with a short explanation of the idea behind the garden design. My favorite was this:

"Mysterious and light, fanciful and joyful, this garden evokes the soul of those departed and works on the idea of reincarnation. The presence of birds brings peace to its visitors." It then quotes this marvelous story by Philippe Cailltaud:

Every day at the end of the 1970s I went to see my grandparents, who lived in a street close to mine. The rue du Haut-Pas in Dieppe. They lived in a flat on the first or second floor. I can't remember now. I often saw my grandmother feeding the birds on the kitchen window ledge. A group of feathered creatures, that was to say the least mixed, had become habitual visitors and came to beg for their sustenance every day. Side-by-side there were pigeons, sparrows and of course a seagull; an emblematic creature of the town, providing the soundtrack of life in Dieppe. It seemed to be the same ones who always came back and my grandmother talked to them. She had a conversation with them. One day she explained to me that these weren't in fact just any old birds: they were the reincarnation of members of her family (and so of mine) that she had known well and who had died at various times in the past. Obviously their appearance had changed a little, but she could recognize them because their fundamental attitudes had remained the same. So Aunt Léontine was still as stingy and surly, Uncle Marcel, miserly, Uncle Ferdinand generous and musical, Aunt Alice reliable and cheery, Godmother still ate as much, and so on and so on. She recognized the dead people who came to visit her. She gave them her little offerings and all these birds found they were given names. Dieppe Metempsychosis. So it seems that in my family, our souls transmigrate into birds.

There were several water gardens, reflecting white puffy clouds, with golden carp swimming below the surface.

We entered one garden through a spiral path that led to a central space where one could relax on hand-crafted chaise lounges. This was purported to be mother nature's birth canal.

Some of the gardens afforded lovely views through the trees and down to the river.

All along there were places to sit and relax and enjoy the many colors, glorious day and pleasant aromas.

 

Ceramic balls of various sizes make wonderful benches

 

Tibetan themed prayer garden

After exiting the exposition gardens, which are re-created by guest gardeners each year, you find another space called the Experimental Garden, created by the regular Château gardening staff. It is evolving but permanent. I am slightly partial to vegetables, so I particularly enjoyed this one, as it is basically a big kitchen garden with its seasonal crops grown and displayed in highly attractive and creative ways.

Vertical seems to be a big theme in the garden and it's such a great way not only to get more space, but allow the produce to grow unencumbered.

If you've been in Paris and seen the famous vertical garden at the Quai Branly, by the new museum near the Eiffel Tower, you know what a gorgeous and exotic thing it can be. Basically a building is covered with a kind of netting that holds soil and an irrigation system. Plants of various shapes, colors and textures are tucked up and down the fabric and create a living wall of plant growth. The technique was first developed here.

 

After hours of garden exploration, one has a whole series of cafés and restaurants to choose from for either a quick refeshment or a full-on meal. No wonder Georges and his family spend two full days here.

We, on the other hand, had to hurry back home to prepare the house for our next visitors.

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The week in Montmirail ended with a Brocante, basically a village-wide garage sale. During the season one can always find one village or another hosting such a sale. This week was our turn.

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Moon rising over the Loire