Addressing the Nature//Culture trope of the exhibition, this series of five drawings will be accompanied by short texts.  Works like the one above ( 40 X 60 cm ), based on 19th century postcards, will act as icons, archetypal images of rural culture and its enduring connections with  landscape and genius loci. I've set out to create an obsessional, perhaps slightly uncanny topographical feel to these drawings…  ( with echoes of Dürer,  Brueghel and Hercules Seghers… ), something the viewer might be tempted to luxuriate in for a time... It has been a challenge to enlarge these postcard-sized images and to try to cause their vast masses and volumes, intensified textural surfaces, and sense of monumental scale to emerge with nothing more than line and tone… from our house in the Ardèche, we look directly across the valley to see le Roche de Don, an enormous, almost freakish volcanic rock extrusion, a couple of hundred feet high, with intimidating, vertiginous slopes much like the one pictured here. I’m beginning now, to make oil studies of rock formations in the gorge of the vallée de Gluyere nearby… and can well understand why Cézanne became so obsessed with painting in the Bibémus Limestone Quarry near his home in Aix-en-Provence… inspired by descriptions like this one:

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“Rocks filled the entire landscape, cubic-like houses, flat, like slabs of cut stone, supporting each other, overhanging in confusion, like the unrecognisable and monstrous ruins of some vanished city… but the fury of their chaos makes one think rather, of volcanoes, deluges and great forgotten cataclysms… “

—  Gustave Flaubert,  L’education sentimentale  1869

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Rocks have certainly entered deeply into my consciousness over the past years while becoming acquainted with the South of France. I  am intrigued by the idea that much of the refined Baroque architecture of Aix-en Provence was built from the raw stone quarried from Bibémus…Nature to Culture via the "hand of man”…  and I  love the notion also, that the Ardèchois folk, posed high up among these gargantuan megaliths, were so much at home with them… the caption on the 1907 postcard I'm working with proudly proclaims "Nos Montagnards insensiblés au vertige”…