Winter in Provence

Life fell into a quiet pace. In the mornings I count the bell tolls while the angular winter light rakes across the crumpled bed covers. In the evenings the cry of the starlings marks 6pm as they dance to their symphony in the sky.

fireplace-provence-cinemagraph-615The distant sound of a person’s footsteps on the quiet ancient streets, the soft ambience of rain outside my aged glass window plane. Most days nothing is happening. The stores have closed for the season, the visitors have gone home to Paris and on many of the restaurants old signs hang saying closed until April.

I go for long walks between the towns, the vista dotted with chimney stacks dancing with smoke. A dusty blue haze settles in before each sunset, a faint reminder of richer blues skies ahead.

It’s better than I imagined, the quiet after years of thriving on noise. Life noise, street noise, work noise. Manhattan just seems to constantly hummm. I used to be afraid of silence but now I find myself in it and it is there in the void where I can paint all the worlds I dream of.

As I work in the short hours of afternoon light I watch as it scans with each passing minute through the room I photograph in. It always seems to start with such gusto and by the time it reaches the last corner before slipping away it slows to a linger like taking that last sip of champagne.

The nights are illuminated by roaring fires and home cooked meals. For years I cursed the winter, I never knew it could actually be so warm. I watch the trees and the vines and the rosebushes rest… and I rest… because with spring awaits new wonders to discover .

Winter Mornings

It’s Hibernating season. Though I do love to get out and play in the snow from time to time or take a dreamy winter vacation, most of the hours are spent indoors with a good book, magazine (currently obsessed with this for food | this for travel | this for interest), or watching documentaries.

Recently I watched Regarding Susan Sontag and I love her thoughtfulness on photography: “We have a notion about a photograph. You see, we want photographs to tell us the truth, and we value them because they really are records in a sense, let’s say, that a painting isn’t. At the same time we want photographs to lie. We want them to make us look good, that is to say, better than we normally look. Our sense of the world is now ruled and shaped by photographed images.” She goes on to state, “The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs.”

I’ve sense started reading her book On Photography which starts with something I fully believe in, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

So this past weekend upstate, I spent every morning in a long hot bath, listening to soft old jazz and reading about that thing I love most of all- photography.

Here is a winter playlist for your own snowy mornings until that spring day comes and we emerge again….

More playlists!

Rainy Days | Summer & Wine | Autumn Days