Friends in High Places...

Old Rennes, the Ty-Anna Tavern

We have younger French friends who live in and around Rennes. This is thanks to Mr. Price's musical 'bent' and his rock band members.
Some of them have lived in the medieval quarter, in buildings with narrow twisting oak staircases and sloping wooden floors. The rue St. Michel, for example, with its half- timbered buildings set at jaunty angles to the perpendicular. These would have belonged to affluent merchants and craftspersons- and I'm not talking cute pottery frogs here, or a hand-crocheted toilet-roll cover!
Elodie and Fred's large room on the first floor overlooked the street through long, wide windows made up of small panes divided by wooden mullions and lead glazing bars. Or muntins as I just found out.....
Everywhere here was built of oak- floorboards, partitions, ceiling, which gave a feeling of being on board an old galleon, or in the heart of a forest, protected by trees.
Contrast this, then, to the uncompromising high-rise apartments which pierce the skyline of Rennes.

In England, living in a block of flats often carries with it a stigma, the cheerless vision of graffiti-scarred, pock-marked stairwells with the heady reek of urine. Not so for our Gallic friends! It's acceptable, even desirable to live in the town where you work. I know a doctor in Rennes whose collegues found it curious- and- laughable when he bought a farmhouse in the countryside a whole fifteen-minutes' drive away.
Inside and out, these French 'grandes immeubles' are bright, clean and well-designed.
Unmistakable among them is the thirty-storey 'Les Horizons', built in 1970 and designed by Maillols. The facade is waves and troughs, light and shadow and, in the evening, when the lights come on in the flats, they make oval shapes.

We've been invited to dine on Saturday in one of the flats, and I've promised to make dessert. It's time, then to open 'The National Trust book of Traditional Puddings' and choose a dish which will prove to the doubting French that English food can be sublime. And I'll can rest safe in the knowledge that when we get there the lift will work and we won't have to carry it up a dark and desolate staircase to the umpteenth floor!

Caroline Johnson - Rennes.

Back Home from Home

Clitheroe and Pendle Hill

A happy Christmas has been had in Brittany after six weeks away.
We painted over thirty shop windows in Clitheroe, a pretty Lancashire town nestling in the shadow of moody, infamous Pendle Hill.

AD Price at Clitheroe Dry Cleaners

It's a delight to be back among friendly folk and the cold days are pierced by plenty of hot drinks and " Do you want a bacon butty, Caroline, only we usually have summat round now?" ; "I made this flapjack last night" ; "would you like a mince pie?" ...well... yes, yes and yes!

Caroline Johnson at Revolve Gallery, Clitheroe

This time the weather's much kinder than last year's constant rain. We've rented a cosy cottage in a nearby village.. and what a treat! it's just a two-minute walk to see my daughter and her family, sit in their kitchen, repel the over-enthusiastic dog who eats my new hat, ("Bad Dog, Trevor!!" ) and do a drawing.

Mr.Price is chuffed, too, to be able to stroll to the shop for The Guardian or an actual pint of milk in a proper bottle.

Parking on the village street's a bit tight, though- feelings run high and an angry note "DO NOT PARK HERE AGAIN!" is left one morning on our windscreen .
Caroline Johnson: Roo's Kitchen #3

Window painting takes up a lot of our time but I manage to get a few sketches done. I'm pleased to get a couple of hours drawing the great view from the back bedroom window towards the church. Here is a delightful muddle of old stone walls, gardens and their clutter of sheds, coal-bunkers and a row of what must have been the old cottage toilets. I wouldn't fancy trailing out there and exposing myself to the season's cruel blasts, I muse, and think of Christina Rossetti's poem....
' In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan'.

Caroline Johnson: The Backs of the Cottages

On the Road Again... Again!

Apologies are way overdue for my absence, my excuses sound like this- being away for most of August; producing new works of Birmingham for my agent ( sounds fancy but means I get even less cash) and five wee paintings of Manchester to do for the Colin Jellicoe Gallery. All this hasn't given me much time for writing.
Mr. Price and myself are once again itinerant artists now staying in a pretty village in the hills of Lancashire, on the edge of the Trough of Bowland, where Tolkein got his inspiration for The Shire.
Like last year, we're painting shop windows with a Yuletide theme in the market town of Clitheroe; to date we're eleven shops down and twenty-odd to go.
I've painted ten robins already and Mr. Price has had his 'baptism of fire' with- for an electrical shop- his depiction of Father Christmas emerging from a 3D television along with various desirable goods... radio, headphones, toaster.
A difficult one, that- but we aim to please! See us in action for the next couple of weeks, take us for a coffee break!!

On the Road Again

Since the beginning of July I've been working hard, travelling and preparing for my daughter's August wedding.
On our travels in Britain Mr Price and I stopped for an hour in Chepstow, promising ourselves a bit of sight-seeing and ice-creams before crossing the Bristol channel by the Severn Bridge.
Chepstow's a pretty Welsh town with, disappointingly, no home-made ice-cream shops along its cobbled streets... frustrated, we opted instead to sit on the sunlit castle lawns to sulk and to sketch.
It's a beautiful ruined Norman castle, perched on a limestone cliff above the river Wye. Building started in 1067 and it's the oldest surviving stone castle in Britain.
In the second Civil War, the parliamentarians, led by Colonel Ewer, took the castle by storm and breached the walls with their cannon.
This was in a fit of pique after they discovered there were no ice creams to be had in town.....

Working On The Railway

Merdrignac is a pretty town on the inland road heading towards western Brittany. The highway runs by Loudeac, Rostrenen, the Daoulas Gorges and the Black Mountains- which aren't exactly vertiginous, but more like high moorland.
After a drive of two or three hours from here, you would reach Finistere of the shipping forecasts and the grimly beautiful Crozon Peninsula with its giddying cliffs and the furious sea thrashing on the reefs.
However, despite its charms, Merdrignac has nothing so spectacular to recommend it to the guide books. Even the trains have gone, but where the railway ran has been made into part of a 'voie verte'- an 18km hiking/cycle track .
Along the way, several old railway passenger shelters are being renovated, and we were asked to paint some reminders of the past inside the one at Merdrignac.
This is what Mr. Price has been doing for
the last week or so and on a searingly hot day I go along to have a look at his work.
He's painted a fifties-style stationmaster and he's added some clutter- a box of lettuces, a shopping bag, an umbrella, torn cinema posters of the era. There's a newspaper on the bench, too, and I see he's shown the article where some poor unfortunate was guillotined the previous morning.. featured later in 'Qui Detective No 552'!
While the artist applies some anti-graffiti varnish I go for a wander. The old station building's used as a council depot now and the yard's full of signs, compressors and other machines- a world that, thankfully, I know little about.
I'm somehow excited when I find a bit of the old railway track glinting through the surface of the 'voie verte', a souvenir of a gentler time when a journey was ruled by a train timetable.
There's a convenient bench further on where I sit and draw what must have been a railway workers' house.
Nearby is the town's swimming pool and, as I work, this provides a backdrop of childrens' cries- "Elise, Elise!!" " Venez les filles!!". It's a class of schoolchildren and the shouting stops only when someone misbehaves, the teacher blows his whistle and tells them off. There's a deathly silence, and even I feel guilty!
Back at the abris voyageur the varnishing's finished- how smelly it is, like nail varnish remover! "Amyl acetate", my Dad once told me, in the days when we could talk, when he wasn't so deaf.
Let's hope the naughty teenagers who hang out in this shelter, drinking beer, kicking the walls and spraying their tags will leave off out of respect for the artist's handiwork!

Armchair Football

Now, I'm not all that keen on football but I once saw an excellent World Cup Final on a TV in a bar in Chamonix in the French Alps. That was in 1966....back....back in time....... on one side of a long table were the English supporters, and opposite us were the... well you get the picture and I'm not one to gloat. Not here anyway.
It's England versus USA tonight, so to turn our evening into a more positive experience for several people at once I suggest to Mr. Price that we take beer round to an English neighbour, (a keen lady football fan, I assure you!) and watch the game there... thinking I can draw the two of them as they followed the match.
There's just one' jumping-up-and-down -and -shouting- YES!' incident from the pair when England score their only goal, so I can work quite solidly as they sit slumped in their armchairs.
And a convenient space on my picture means I can write down bits of commentary from the TV and from my companions.
Someone's got his jumper on his lap while I'm drawing him and complains bitterly that I've made him look like he has "a massive prolapse or something" so I slap on some white gouache to remedy the offending lump and go over that bit again.
Still not quite right, but it'll do and the match is over and we're off and away home with no other cars to be seen, only the flash of moths and a scurry of rabbits in the limbo of the twilight country lanes.

Dinard, Hitchcock and The Birds

Dinard's such a lively and pretty place! It's an old-fashioned Breton seaside town, nestling around white sea-strands and an emerald sea.
In the late 19th century American and British aristocrats popularised Dinard as a fashionable summer resort, and they built stunning villas on the cliff tops and exclusive hotels such as the 'Le Grand Hotel' on the seafront during the French "Belle Epoque".
It's rumoured that Alfred Hitchcock (who spent time here) based the house in 'Psycho' on one of these villas.
Dinard has a British Film Festival each October, and to acknowledge this, a statue of the film director- complete with birds- stands on the promenade by the Plage de l'Ecluse.
A well-placed bench overlooks this and, as I sit and draw, a flock of marauding seagulls sweep down to the beach and attack the belongings trustingly left on the beach by some unwary bather.
In a callous and uncaring way I'm secretly delighted as a plastic bag of, I presume, culinary delights for the returning swimmer, is mercilessly torn to shreds before a sunbathing 'neighbour' stops the destruction by shouting and flapping his arms.
As I continue with my sketch I wonder if Hitchcock ever witnessed something similar? Before me, his bronze statue looks out over the scene and his dead eyes glint in the hot sun, but he remains understandably impassive....