The Colors of the Lot: A Painter’s Inner Palette
The palette that valley left in my hands.
When I stand in front of a canvas in my Boston studio, my hand reaches before my mind does. It goes for the same colors every time, the ones the Lot pressed into me as a child. White from limestone. Red and yellow from ochre. Black from charcoal. In the painted caves of the Dordogne and the Lot, from Lascaux to Pech Merle, the earth offered these same pigments to hands working in the dark more than seventeen thousand years ago. This palette lives on, and it lives in me.
I learned to see beside my grandmother in Souillac. But the light did half the teaching. The light of the Dordogne valley belongs to no other place. It comes off the chalky, towering limestone cliffs, built from centuries of sediment, coral, shells and algae left behind when the seas retreated. They hold the sun and give it back cooler, older. This is the color of things that have been there far longer than we have, and it is the first light my eyes ever learned.
Growing up near that landscape meant absorbing it before there were words for it. Red ribbons of tilled earth glistening against white cliffs in the distance. The Dordogne shifting between blue and green depending on the hour. Tall poplars along the river, their dark shadows stretched to the heavens like eager arms. The dry smell of coumarin rising from the valley on summer evenings, when swallows flew low. These things settled into the body and stayed. They became, without my knowing it, my first color education.
The Lot rises through my hands.
So when I lay down marble dust and pumice on a canvas in Boston, I am not borrowing from somewhere distant. The Lot rises through my hands. It is in the gesture before it is on the canvas. French red ochre carries the weight of turned earth, the Lot’s fields after rain. The whites hold the coolness of limestone in morning light, the translucency of fog unraveling across the valley. Underneath everything, umber and charcoal anchor the composition the way underground galleries connect plateau and valley through hidden passageways: a world of secrets, mystery and discovery.
A painting builds the way the valley built itself. In layers, over time, without hurry, like the meandering Dordogne. What rises to the surface has been a long time coming. If you stay with it, something rises to meet you. Not a landscape seen, but one remembered in the body, the way the smell of warm rain on dry earth brings back everything at once.