"You Are Never in Ouides" our neighbor said...

In the summer of 1997, we rented a small house in the Auvergne; the house was located in a village called Ouides. There were no shops, only a church with three bell towers,  and Ouides was a quiet place at the best of times; at last count, there were 26 houses lived in year-round, 46 second homes, and one vacant house.  Amy and Vince, American friends who came to visit us there, used to take what they called "cow walks" before bed at night, accompamied by the sounds of soft cowbells and the occasional low mooing from the cows in the nearby fields.  Our principal entertainment came from local marchés; there was a market each day of the week somewhere around us. We even found a town totally dedicated to mushrooms, and had our fill of morels, for the first and last time in our lives. We also explored the nearest city,  Le Puy-En-Velay, where there were restaurants and where we washed our clothes and attended a massive flea market (called a brocante); here is one of the flyers:

We also spent some time at the nearby Lac du Bouchet, a very pretty little round lake with an inn at one end that served lunches and dinners:

Here is our anniversary dinner bill (Amy and Vince bought it for us... the prices are in francs):

So, it's no wonder our neighbor said we were "never in Ouides."  I am writing about all this because I am placing my latest odalisque in Ouides ... she is having a hard time fitting into the setting I am painting for her, and the setting itself has been re-painted and scraped and sanded and is still a work in progress. Here are a couple of pieces of the 2 x 4' painting, so far:

three oranges, no apples....

I am working on the painting that is working on me ... I took a photograph of its new paint from an angle:

And then, I was looking back at other photographs and I like the orange notes (especially up against the swirling blues of the sky) in this photo from a visit to our son and his girlfriend in Los Angeles:

And, last, comes a small hand-painted bowl from Istanbul, found on a visit to a new store called Ottoman Art in St. Helena (www.ottomanartlc.com) with amazing contrasts in a small space:

the other side of the canvas....

Taking down and putting up and framing, today:

And more work on that painting ... the pear and the river ... and still there is either too much detail, or too little (it isn't clear to me yet):

The inspiration was a passage by W.G. Rogers, on traveling near Nimes with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas:  "Across a completely charming countryside where the air had the tang of ripening fruit, and where white, chalky soil burst in brilliant splashed through the vivid, sometimes dazzling, green of the foliage."  You do see... you want some, but not too much, of that dazzle.

" ... the omitted part ..."

I am working on the painting from yesterday and before ... (the pear is one piece of it), and I have been layering it so that the background and foreground are fighting with each other a bit:

Here, there is the slightest hint of a straight line up against the curve of the "river," but with the original boundaries softened a bit and the harsh colors gone ... Hemingway wrote, in The Moveable Feast, that he had not written the "real end" (which was a nasty one) of a story: "This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."  I love this idea ... [although when I talked about it with students in class, it took a lot of discussion before they understood or believed it!].  I think that when there is an idea that begins a painting, and then, as the painting goes along with the idea continually shifting shape, that if the idea sustains itself, then the painting can come into being.  Here is another piece, and another after that: