Maison Basse, Fontaine de Vaucluse, and Pont Julien

In Treasures of Provence last week we went to visit Maison Basse, a very old French farmhouse that SCAD now owns and is renovating and I think they said they are going to turn it into a studio space or something like that. Which, I do not envy the students that would have to use that as their class space, the hike to place is fine, it's going back up the very steep hillside that sucks. I was dying after the walk back to the dorms that day.


I'm hoping to use the Maison Basse as one of my reference pieces for my final paper in Treasures class. I want to write a comparison of the accuracy of Beauty and the Beast (the Disney version, because it is my favorite) to actual provencial architecture and clothing. And carry that on to show how the accuracy of a film effects the believability of its storytelling. Hopefully I can find enough info on it to write 7-9 pages about it.




Here's a view of Lacoste from the Maison Basse, as you can see we really didn't go that far from the town. At one point someone had built a balcony attatched to the farmhouse so that they could look up at the chateau. Which we learned is a big 'no no'. Something about how you aren't supposed to look up at the castles because it was disrespectful or something like that. I imagine that the Marquise de Sade probably would have gotten off on the attention in some way...I mean come on, it's not as if he was a modest person to begin with (nor could you really see much other than the stone work of the chateau.)



I'm not sure if you can see it all that well but there are roman numerals on the wall where supposedly an ancient clock used to be. I'd believe it since parts of the farm house dates back to the Roman Empire (I think that's what our guide said anyway.)









On Tuesday, last week I became a stow-a-way on the Travel Portfolio classes bus, as I will be for every trip they take and the space is available, to go to a little village called Fontaine de Vaucluse. There were two main reasons that they were going to this particular village. 1) there is a spring that feeds the river that runs through the town that no one has found the bottom to yet (man or unmanned) and 2) because of the paper mill there. And no I don't mean like the smelly paper mill in Savannah, I mean one that actually produces the paper we as artists use.


This is part of the mill, unfortunately they weren't actually making any paper that day, but I believe we are supposed to go back to the town later this quarter and hopefully we will get to see the machines in action at that time. Over all though, even with nothing really happening it was just cool to be able to go in there and look around. The gift shop there was small but really cool because of all the different maps, cards, single sheets or even sketchbooks full of the paper they made there. I didn't buy anything this time, but I might next time.


Here is the spring that I was talking about. What you are looking at is the sources of the river. It really made me miss home because there are some beaches where the water is close to that color, though much much warmer than the spring is. It was really awesome to see the source so calm and beautiful and then suddenly there was a raging river pouring out of it. In fact the rapids are good enough for kayakers to train there (which we saw two guys doing just that.) I think they may even have smaller competitions held there, but I'm not sure.



Finally I took this as we were leaving the village. I really don't know much about the bridge other than it was really big and amazingly cool to see. I imagine it's Roman, since there are aqueducts and bridges all over Provence built by he Romans.






This is a short video I took of the source and the river it feeds.





Speaking of Bridges, on the way to and from Apt we pass this 3000 year old bridge called Pont Julien. This one I know for a fact is Roman built, and up until 10 or 20 years ago, they still let cars drive across it. They don't do that anymore, but you can still walk across it or bike across it (which I did).

Ocher Mines and Roussillon

Last Wednesday (I know, I'm behind) we went to the Ocher Mines near Roussillon with my Treasures of Provence class. It was a lot of fun, if very cold. We first took a tour of the area. The lady that gave us a tour was this short, but very pretty woman that spoke English very well. She only struggled to find the right word maybe three times. I'm still amazed how well the people her can speak both French and English. I guess that's what happens when they are taught a second or sometimes even third language at a young age.


Basically what the tour consisted of her taking us around to all the different areas that were involved in the process of making ocher. A basic run down of the process is that sand containing ocher is collected and run through different machines to separate it. The the ocher pigment is left in the sun and open air to dry before being made into bricks of ocher. All the bricks are collected and ground down into a fine powder, ready to be separated into jars and sold in store. I also learned that red ocher oxidized yellow ocher, because all ocher contains iron in it. So in order to get large quantities of red ocher, they force oxidation. Which is kinda cool imo.

Anyway, after the tour we got to watch a demo on mixing your own paints. And after she had explained to us the process then we got to actually make our own paints using the natural pigments. It was an amazing experience mixing your own watercolours. I use the red ocher, because that is one of my favourite colours, but really all the colours that she had available were mixed at one point and used by everyone.



The store there sold a whole lot of the pigments along with other cool natural pigmented art supplies, such as pastels. I didn't get any though because they were fairly expensive, and I don't really know how often I would use it. Oh, before we went to mix paints, we visited this small memorial dedicated to the workers that had died because of some kind of lung disease from breathing in all the ocher dust that a visiting artist had built as a permanent installation. It was sort of sad, but also an interesting display none-the-less.



After our tour, we drove to Roussillon, but only stayed for about 15 minutes before we had to drive back to Lacoste for lunch. I did get some cool photos during those 15 minutes though.

To Bonnieux!

I just got back from a 11 or 12 km hike (so a 6-7 miles). It was kind of intense since I'm not in the shape that I used to be, but it was totally worth it. My legs are just going to be sore tomorrow while we are in Apt. Which may be annoying.





Anyway, we travelled to Bonnieux, which is a bit larger of a town than Lacoste, just so we could see it and wander around. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I wanted to because we ended up stopping in this tiny little restaurant bar where we met this really interesting lady that spoke English really well because she lived in the US for about 19 years. We talked about where we were from and why we were there and she told us a bit about her self. There was also this man sitting with her that I am pretty sure didn't speak a word of English that kept repeating the names of the two dogs that were in the restaurant with us. One was names Boule and the other was named
Beethoven. But that was literally all he really said to us.








The owner of the store (which Beethoven is his dog; the little one in the chair) was really kind and attempted to speak English to us, so we left him a few euro tip for helping us. I ordered a really good cup of hot chocolate (because I don't drink coffee) and the four of us that found it plan on going back again once we get access to the bikes they have available here for the students.



Oh since I mentioned the dogs....It's really strange here to see all the dogs just wandering around without there owners and not wearing collars or leashes. Not to mention that they are all allowed in the buildings, whether they are restaurants or stores or whatever.




Back to Bonnieux; we had gone there yesterday in the rain and wind, up to a church at the top of the hill. It was really quite stunning since the man that gave us our tour had built a nativity seen along with a small town inside the church. I guess the church itself isn't used that much any more except on special occasions or something, but it was impressive. If small. Oh btw it was a Catholic church. There is a history between Bonnieux and Lacoste. Lacoste used to be heavily Protestant and Bonnieux was heavily Catholic and I can't remember suring what time period, but there was a lot of blood shed because the two religions could not get along with eachother (surprise surprise.)


Tom Also drew a picture for the guy since he was kind enough to let us see the church on his own time.

Fairy Villages and Secret Gardens

A couple of the students were wandering around Lacoste a few days ago and discovered this tiny little village built into and on the wall of the path that leads to our “skype lab”. And today I got to go see it for myself, and as you can see I took some pictures. It has been dubbed it the “fairy village” (I should find out what that would be in French) and it’s quite a remarkable, cute little find. And I am sure that there will be a few sketches of it in a lot of us SEQA kids sketchbooks, along with doodles of the fairies that we have decided live there.


I guess that Jen asked Professor Gobel, our wonderful Treasures of Provence professor, if she could write one of her papers about it, and as a result he explained to her what it really was and where it came from. Apparently, the students at the Lacoste Art School that used to be here (before SCAD came in and decided that they wanted to buy it from them) started it years ago and had the school not been taken over, students from each preceding year were to add to the village. Which frankly I think is a really fun idea.


I’m curious if they would allow us to add to it, or if it’s something that they would rather let be as a way to remember the school that used to reside here.






While we are talking about somewhat magical little places that we’ve all discovered here, there is a garden, which we do have access to, that the locals and residents call the “Secret Garden”. It actually kind of hard to get into cause you have to stick your fingers between the door and the wall and unhook a latch on the inside before you can enter. And because it is still fairly chilly out and most of us are wearing gloves, it’s hard to actually manage to unhook the latch.

Anyway, there are these really cool huts made of vines that were sculptures that a visiting artist built. What’s cool is that these things were only supposed to last about 6 months, but as you can see from the photos there are still two standing (there were originally four, but they removed two of them.) Now I’m not entirely sure how long they have been here, but it’s definitely been longer than six months.






I can’t wait till we can sit in the garden (without worry of freezing our butts off in the snow) and draw, cause it has a really nice view. Though really, most places in the village do, but still, it’s a fun place to be. I assume there are flowers that will bloom when it starts getting warmer up there, considering garden is in the name. Maybe they actually have a veggi garden in there during the spring and summer. Who knows?

First Day of Classes

Day one of classes is over and I think I am content with how things are going to turn out here. I’m kind of lucky because I am only taking two classes while I am over here, and both happen to be on Mondays and Wednesdays only, so I get early weekends and have Tuesdays and Thursdays to do whatever. Which is how I’ll manage to hopefully travel with the Travel Portfolio class on some of their excursions.

Lets start with Treasures of Provence, since that is my 0900 class. Aside from some technical problems the class went smoothly. Professor Gobel is a really nice guy and seems genuinely enthusiastic about what he is teaching. I’m a little disappointed just because it really doesn’t seem like we are traveling all that much, which is sort of understandable cause we have quite a few “travel class” and there is only so much budget. But still, we have 4 days where we end up not really having class. Odd, but it’s going to be something I have to accept none-the-less. We still go visit a lot of cool places.

We’ll be visiting the following:
Glanum and St. Remy
Casaneuve (a mosaic studio)
Abbaye de Senanque
Les Bories
And of course Angouleme (or Barcelona for all the non-SEQA students) and Paris.

Since I do have Tuesdays and Thursdays to myself, I’m going to try and just walk/bike around the countryside a bit, maybe travel to some of the other towns and explore. And I do think that there are planned trips for us sometimes on the weekends, so that will be fun.

My 1630 (4:30 pm for those of you not military time savvy) class, Visual Storytelling II, was also awesome. Unlike my 0900 we won't be traveling that much if at all in Vis II, but I'm starting work on what I hope to do for my Senior Project class, so I'm psyched about that. ( I'll tell you all about it after I have some art work to go with it.) It's going to be a bit of an unusual class since technically there is a student that is taking Vis I in it, so I have a feeling that there is going to be a lot of refresher information being throw at us. But honestly, it's been about a year and a half since I took Vis I, so I'm glad that all the information I learned is going to be talked about again.

Mostly the class consisted of power points and slide shows, which was cool, because I knew a lot of the artists/art on those slides, either from having read the books, or just having looked up the artists in the past. So I felt smart as we talked about it. Always a good feeling.

Other than that we didn't do much actual work. We have homework already. 12 thumbnails from the scripts that we wrote for the class due Wednesday. Which technically I had already written in Kneece's class last quarter, so all I had to do was make sure that I used specific ref for all the locations that could be found here.

I don't think working on these pages will be too hard, unlike the script I wrote for myself for my web comics class, I wrote this one in a plot format. Which btw, I love plot scripts so much. Even when I write for myself in full script format, by the time I get to drawing the pages, I've changed my mind about what exactly I want to have happen in each panel. So the plot format makes it so I can immediately decided what I want to happen as I go as I am sketching the thumbnails. And the character acting seem to be way less stiff when work this way. My pages sucked when I worked from full scripts that I had written.

3 Days in Lacoste....we have snow.

Bon Soir,



The flight to France was an interesting one. I made it to Paris after sitting in the Cincinnati airport for five hours before a nine hour flight. Always fun. And then when I got to the CDG Paris airport I almost thought that I wasn't in the right place, but after spotting another of the students that I knew sitting on the floor I breathed a sigh of relief. In Marsielle I found out that they lost my bags. So until this evening (day 3) I was clean clothe-less. Thank you snow.

Anyway, flight aside, I took the picture you see here from the plane of the sun rising as we passed over England.


So I just have to say that Lacoste is amazingly beautiful. Especially covered in snow. Which they haven't had snow like this in a long time apparently.

I certainly wasn't expecting any snow when we arrived, but at least I was prepared. And my mother bought me the most epic waterproof hicking boots ever. I stepped in about 5 inches of water, and my feet were still kept dry. I am so thankful. But hopefully the snow will melt soon. It is kinda treacherous tho. I mean the roads are all really steep and the melting snow is icing over at night, fairly early, so it's not entirely safe to walk around past like 6 pm.


These last few days have mostly been spent just wandering around, taking lots of photos of a medieval snow covered village and I have to say it's been breath taking. I've taken over 400 photos already and I've only been here three days. I can't imagine how many I will have taken by the time I leave here.

Oh, I should mention that the food here is pretty amazing. SCAD has there own chef which is kinda cool. I've been eating really healthy which is a tad unusual for me. I had an orange today for the first time in ages. But I imagine I'm going to be in great shape when I get back from France. My legs are going to be so toned. It's crazy.


I am really looking forward to being able to explore the area without all the snow, just because it's going to look different and be a bit safer. Not that I don't love all the snow, it's stunning. I also can't wait to get out of Lacoste and go to Apt and a few other area's around the area. Cause I bet it's going to be just as beautiful as it is here. (and I"m a reference whore.) I think there is a trip to Bonnieux which I am going to see if I can go to if I have the time.


Here is a pic of the Chateau de Sade which I visited today. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but still very cool. There was this strange statue of the Marquis de Sade which consisted ofhis head in a iron cage, and his arms crossed, but not actually attached to the head....It was strange.

I also went down to one of the quarries near here which was so amazing. It had such a ruins feel to it, I loved it. Again I want to go down there when there's no snow just so I can see more of it. Tho the freaky thing about the quarry was that there was this headless stuffed feline in a cage. No idea why but it was creepy. The one disappointing thing about the quarry was that there was a lot of graffiti everywhere, both from the locals and past SCAD students. But oh well.

Well I'm going to stop rambling now. I'm sure half of this is repetitive and boring, but i"m kinda tired and my brain isn't exactly functioning all that well atm. I should go to bed, I have both my classes tomorrow. One of which I have to be up for before 9...especially if I want to get breakfast.

Bonne nuit!

Welcome!

When I first created this blog I had intended it to be an art blog. Just another place where I can feature my original work. Well, as you can see, I've been very slow getting to this point. But since I will be going to France in a little less than two days, and lets face it, France is arguably one of the greatest art capitals of the world, I figured now would be an excellent time to start using this thing. Hard part will be keeping up with it I suppose, but I will do my best.

In the next 8 weeks to come I will attempt to post pictures and comments/rants to go with them about my time studying in Lacoste. Along with my travels to Angouleme and Paris. And provided we have a decent scanner available I will also up load my own work that I've done while I'm there. Might throw in some of the prep work I've done for one of my classes there too, if I get the chance.

Anyway, I hope anyone that reads this will enjoy it, if only for all the cool reference photos that I'll be sharing here.