Week Six

I have to be honest. I’m exhausted this week.

But I do want to share the work of Olive Ayhens, who held a fantastic open studio here in Auvillar last Tuesday.

I love her paintings!

Here is a small sample:

From Wiki:

Olive Madora Ayhens is an American visual artist. She first gained recognition in California in the 1970s for stylized figurative work, but is most known for the fantastical, dizzying cityscapes, landscapes and interiors, often depicting New York City, that she has painted since the mid-1990s.[2][3][4] These works intermingle the urban and pastoral, and inside and outside, employing absurd juxtapositions, improbabilities of scale and vibrant colors, in pointed but playful explorations of the clash between civilization and nature.[5][6][7] New York Sun critic David Cohen has described her images as “poised between the lyrical and the apocalyptic. They capture both the poetry and the politics of the densely populated, literally and metaphorically stratified, used and abused city.”[8] She is based in Brooklyn, New York.[9][10]

Ayhens has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship[11] and awards from the Joan Mitchell, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb and Pollock-Krasner foundations.[12][13][14] She has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), American Academy of Arts & Letters,[15] Roswell Museum[16] and New York State Museum.[17] Her work belongs to the public collections of MTA Arts & Design in New York,[18] the Oakland Museum of California[19] and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art,[20] among others.

***

Lucky

One day,

a small garden snail

affixed to my front door.

Celadon spiral suspended

on the dusty blue facing.

Day after day,

I monitored him,

worried about a fall,

only to find

that each morning,

he’d inched higher

up the casing.

Immobile during daylight,

proceeding only

under cover of night,

like a spirit guide

poised at the portal…

he’s such a lucky fellow.

With a foot that’s both

conveyor belt

and suction cup,

he never has to let go

in order to

move forward.

I was feeling fairly competent, tooling around France in the VCCA car, picking people up at the airport and the train station, and guiding fellows through the Valence d’Agen Market, so I decided to go shopping in Toulouse after I dropped Olive off at the airport.

How bad could it be? I grew up in a city.

Bad.

In Toulouse, Waze guided me down an alleyway so narrow I would have had trouble negotiating it on a bicycle. When I reached the end of the alley, I was supposed to turn right, but that was a problem because there was a wall in front of me. To turn right, I had to execute an eight-point turn.

Let’s just say, the honking was intense.

During that alleyway mishap, I grew so flustered, my phone flew out of my hand, and when I had finally dislodged the car, I could just hear the Waze woman muttering somewhere near my feet—muffled, like she was being smothered. I thought she said to turn right at the end of the next street, but I soon discovered that I had misheard her, because turning right took me up onto a bicycle bridge over the Garonne River.

I am unable to adequately describe the horror of ending up in a car on a bicycle bridge driving across a huge expanse of water, with Toulousain cyclists flipping me off left and right.

I really hope I don’t get an enormous ticket in the mail, but honestly, how could I not? There had to have been a camera…

Eleven weeks is a long time to be away from family, but the only one who really seems to be suffering is my fifteen-year-old dog, Bruno. He went to the vet two days before I left and received a perfect bill of health, but since I left the States, he has ended up in doggie ER twice with Paraphimosis, and if you don’t know what that is, you are better off, believe me.

Suffice it to say, he’s stitched up, but I feel terrible when pictures like this pop up in my texts:

À bientôt,

Kelly