Forty-two years ago in the winter of 1977-78 while studying art in Aix-en-Provence I began to use salvaged cardboard as substitute for canvas panel. Here are relics of those student days, starting with a series of interiors of Villa Jean Nelly, the home of Suzanne and Joseph Roman who hosted me. They and their adult children Jean Paul and Nelly, for whom the villa was named, were very warm and kind hosts, better as hosts than I was as a guest at times.
Here is Rubat, a well contented cat with little demand on his time. This was done in the sunroom at the entrance to the Roman home. I hear Nelly, the daughter, a painting instructor, gently chiding me not to mix away all the vibrancy of color when I look at the surface of the table.
This was an exercise in using a limited palette and I like how it worked for the clay pot and the leaves. Unfortunately, the pot and its plate are several degrees off vertical. This may have been done on the desk in my bedroom.
Here is a view of the bed. The quilt offered me the chance for a sort of pre-cubist assembly of planes of color to create volume - very much a Cezanne approach, though he used warm and cool colors to fully perfect this effect. I like the abstraction in this piece and the rectangular blocks of color and black and white. This was about the time I encountered Nicolas de Staël’s paintings. I was beginning to work with. palette knife and so his approach was very appealing.
Here is a companion piece to the bed that I greatly like. It is the table where I worked, a piece now in the hands of a fellow Millsaps art graduate, Bill Tyler. (Thanks Bill for sending it) Over the table is the poster from a Paul Klee show I saw at the Fondation Maeght a wonderful museum overlooking St. Paul de Vence. On the table are my schoolbooks and dictionaries, a lamp, and some of my outdoors gear. I regret that the surface is missing spots of paint.
This was an assignment to do a specific task. First to break a scene into three values, light, medium and dark, and underpaint these with cadmium yellow, cerulean blue, and alizarin crimson. Then to paint using pointillist technique the surface of the objects. I didn’t have the needlepoint precision of a Seurat. Instead I have this blunt edged approach. But there were places where it ended up working. This was a set of cast off clothes hanging on a clothes rack, canvases, and perhaps a backpack, next to a chest of drawers.
This was on the Chemin de Beauregard east of downtown Aix in the vicinity of where my friend John lived. It was done mostly in palette knife with some brush work when necessary. I liked this a lot when I did it for reasons I still don’t understand. It has my restrained notion of a Soutine expressionism but without the bloody colors and the landscape as entrails. I guess that means it’s actually nothing like Soutine after all. It also reminds me of the nocturnal visits to meet up with friends further up this road, that involved cutting through a farmer’s meadow near the Ruisseau la Torse.
This was done in the Alps on a very short trip to Grindelwald. I still like this scene a lot. I later did a version on a single panel which my cousin Lee Green has up in Virginia. This was the only time I did a Grand Mountain View, having spent most of my time on the much more modest Mt. Ste. Victoire and surroundings. I found this cardboard outside a small grocery in town and set myself up to do this scene. I didn’t have very much time, no more than a couple of settings. Below is the reverse of this alpine scene, two panels from a Marlboro box, or what I used to joke was my Andy Warhol tribute.
