Provencal Moon - Oil on Canvas

This picture evolved out of several hikes and a holiday my wife and I took in southern France when our first child was not quite three years old. Those who go summer walking in Provence meet an abrupt and jagged world of mountain ridges and barley coloured limestone rock where old vineyards, many in decay now but some renewed, cling to terraced slopes suspended high above dark sweet-chestnut woods. Up in cloud-high forgotten mountain villages where water-spouts spurt cold streams into ancient stone troughs, it is mostly quiet now because the young have gone to the cities. There where the breeze breathes on the traveller the scent of a myriad mountain flowers, and shepherds lead the flocks among precipitous high grasses, the view is endlessly away to craggy blue horizons, and lavender and rosemary grow out of the rock and tangles of juniper and aromatic myrtle fill the gullies.
Provence is not for the faint-hearted walker. Moderately inclined ground is only to be found by the river banks and the walker can be forgiven for thinking that all the rest is a development on the theme of verticality. That, at least, is half of Provence, but for the other half that we associate with impressionist paintings, the mountains are a blue backdrop to rich rolling fields of vine and wheat and silver olive, where broad-leaved figs lean over the path and red-limbed pines and cypresses give perfumed shade from the fierce Mediterranean sun.
Provence is the home of spectacular gorges, and in this picture the low ground and the high ground meet where a mountain torrent breaks out into the plain. A photograph served to set the scene for mother and child in the foreground, and the rest is as the remembered mood took me. The image of the moon incongruously bright in the brilliant morning sky above a panoramic landscape of valley crops and distant peaks had been in my mind for many years. It gave the landscape an other-worldly feel, as if this were Middle Earth and Gondor lay below

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