I’ve been thinking about my quick statement about selling the collage to a friend here……..that it was my favorite of all the pieces I did. And it is……….but why is that? The main reason is that it summed up or symbolized the trip and what I saw and felt there.

Every day we wandered the little curving roads in this area of the Aude and Ariege departments of France. Wandering slightly south, you were always amazed at the sun lighting up the Pyrenees at some times of the day or their cloaking by the clouds at other times. However, their presence was always felt. One other presence was the corridors of plane trees everywhere in the region (and others, of course) of France. Both of these presences are not something I run across in northeastern Texas.

When I set up to do work in the studio, I had to work for several days just to paint and prepare papers to use in a collage. Hum…how could I have forgotten it would take some time to collect stuff for adding to mixed media? In the interim, I painted. So one morning I finally had to start making something and started with a 15 inch square with dark blues for a background. I started tearing from some of the other papers and low and behold, I suddenly saw those mountain ranges………..as I kept on adding small bits and pieces, I suddenly realized there were the trunks of the plane trees ……or what I think symbolized the rows of plane trees. None of the colors are colors I think of when I think of April in the Languedoc (green is THE color at this time) but for me, this collage symbolized what I had been seeing and internalizing……..and I actually saw it as I worked. This isn’t something that happens often for me. I usually only see this later when the work is finished. The link for the image was in the previous post. I’ve got to figure out why some of my images are rotating and not coming up correctly……..in the interim, just check the link.

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