The Landscape Within
The grandmother, the café and the valley behind my paintings.
I grew up in the limestone hills of Southwest France, where black truffles grow underground and Malbec vines run along the hillsides. Along the Dordogne valley, walnut trees and sunflower fields run down to the river. My family has lived in Souillac for generations, and as a child I would visit my grandmother there.
It was beside her that I first learned to paint, or more precisely, to look. She was not gentle about it. Deliberate in her waiting, firm in her silence, abrupt when she finally spoke. She would stand in front of a landscape for a long time and say nothing, then say exactly one thing. It landed. Children in those days did not ask many questions, even if their imagination brimmed with curiosity. So there was a lot of silence, and a lot of looking.
It’s by her side that I first heard about the bustling cultural life of 1950s France, and in particular the Pierre Betz years. Betz edited the literary and artistic review Le Point, and he had set up his offices at the Café de Paris in Souillac, my hometown. The café soon became one of the great meeting places of postwar French culture. Paul Éluard, André Malraux, Aragon, Prévert and Le Corbusier came through; others lingered. Robert Doisneau grew so attached to the Lot that he called it the most beautiful landscape in France.
My grandmother passed that world on to me as compressed memories, impressions worn smooth by the years, the residue of a life lived close to extraordinary people without ever making a monument of it. She was whimsical too, and resilient in ways I only understood much later. For special occasions, I was taken to the Café de Paris myself. I still vividly remember its famous dessert, le « fromage »: hazelnuts, crème au beurre, and layer upon layer of croquant and meringue. We ate it beneath fantastical zodiac frescoes, with the local anecdotes that went with them. It often felt bigger than life, just like my grandmother.
My grandmother never told me what to see.
Only about five years ago did I begin to understand the weight of what she had witnessed, and what that café had been. Scattered childhood memories suddenly came together into something much larger: as a child, I had bathed, without knowing it, in a place full of the traces those artists had left behind.
That knowledge didn’t change the paintings, which had always drawn from the same deep source. It changed my understanding of where that source came from, and it has traveled with me from the Dordogne valley to my studio in Boston. What I carry into my canvases is not a memory of France so much as a physical knowledge of it, the way a landscape lives on in the body long after you have left.
My grandmother never told me what to see. She taught me to wait until something showed itself, and to be there when it did. It is still the only lesson I really teach.