I want to go paint in Roussillon

 Running to the train at 6am com d’ab 

Eating 2 RELAY madeleines as usual pre-train

Where is Brugnon?

 

Everyone knows August/Aout in Paris is very quiet/tranquille/basically dead. But seeing a guy lying down on the pavement on rue de Rivoli (in the Marais) chatting on the phone!? This is a first 🙄

Meanwhile my latest obsession/enthrallment is les pêche Brugnon nectarine.

Provençal ochres in Villars

The colors of Provence are to die for

Especially the ochres. Ochre pigments come from nearby mines in Roussillon.

Sometimes I think my best watercolors end up on the color test swatches. Today I wanted to get those colors into some Provençal paintings.

Villars is a quiet, tiny hilltop town you never heard of. There isn't much there to draw tourists

But there is plenty for artists to draw.

Nice windows too...with cats sitting in them.

The colors of the faded ochre walls will make you melt.

That cat got moved around today.

A high point of Villars is their one and only boulangerie

With its still functioning wood-burning oven.

Villars is surrounded by fields of Rosé vineyards.

The other major high point is la Poste. I was captivated.

I painted it

2 times.

After working so hard in the sun you need to jump into a cool pool.

Voila.

On the way to Provence Bear worked on his calligraphy in the train. He needs to practice more but your envelopes are getting prettier by the minute. Thanks for reading Parisbreakfastg.  If you'd like Parisbreakfast letters, maps and watercolors in your mailbox, do look in my shop.

Bon reves de Provence.

Roussillon, Vaucluse

If you will insist on having homemade apricot jam for breakfast in the Luberon, then you must go off to Roussillon (an apricot-colored town) immediately if not sooner.

I did go yesterday and am still reeling.

Roussillon is a hill town (village perché) set on cliffs of the most extraordinary colors and a huge source of earth colored pigments, raw and burnt sienna, ochres, umbers.

Regarde! Wow

Roussillon is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France. Roussillon lies within the borders of the Parc Naturel Régional du Luberon. Roussillon is noted for its large ochre deposits found in the clay surrounding the village. Ochres pigments range from yellow, orange, red. One of the former ochre quarries can be visited via the "Sentier des Ocres" (Ochre Path), a walk of either 30-60 minutes through the old works

A-Mazing!

The town is stunning

I was absolutely certain

I would find an outfit head-to-toe terra cotta color

Maybe a terra cotta T-shirt that said,

"I HEART ❤️ ROUSSILLON"

It doesn't exist.

Not even a scarf in these fabulous colors 

By the way, if you see pigments on sale there labeled 'Apricot' do Not buy them. There is no such color except  in makeup 💄 & wall paint.

I made watercolor sketches of Roussillon. This may become a print...if you'd like one, let me know.

Sienna Pigment Not Siena, the town

There's much lore about pigments and color. In the French village perché of Roussillon, a man and his wife lived on top of a big cliff. He was fiercely jealous of his beautiful wife, imagining she preferred other men.

Finally in a fit of rage he threw her over the cliff. 

Her blood 🩸 ran down and stained the grey rocks a rich deep red ochre. Et voilà we have wonderful pigments coming from Roussillon... It's a place all artists should visit.

I've always loved earth colors. Sienna evokes dreams of Tuscany and was originally mined near the town of Siena, therefore it's name. A natural earth color, it was one of the first pigments used and found in many cave paintings.

Earth colors are always warm colors. Nice to remember. And they go well with all cool colors, the blues and the greens. So be kind to the earth for giving us such lovely colors.

The old way to make burnt sienna is to take raw sienna rocks, stack them in a big brick oven-like room. Then they are heated/roasted to remove water from the clay till they calcify and change into a red-brown colour.

It's true I "turned up my nose" at my mother's exotic fruits. But when she let me play with her old paint box - that was different. Eventually I came to own her shiny black enamel paintbox. It is my best friend.

While I was researching watercolor recipes, I made the pilgrimage to Winsor & Newton in Harrow, near London. The front door opens into The Colourmen's Shop, a wonderful facsimilie of a 19th century art supply shop. Glass case upon case of pigment jars, old Victorian paint boxes, brushes and all the painting paraphrenalia artists love = 7th heaven.

You can pay a call at W& N's Colourmen Shop by clicking on ABOUT US, then HISTORY, and then VIRTUAL MUSEUM. Have fun !

Pigment 101

I might have mentioned that I worked for 5 years in a pigment shop. It changed my life and changed my painting when I finally got around to cooking up my own watercolor paints. Being surrounded by 500+ colors did it. The Kremer Pigmente catalog cover is from one of my color test sheets..it wasn't my idea. We have dozens of color charts like the one below, hand-made in London, How else to show a gazillion colors?

Passerbys come in begging to buy these glass jars all the time. Not for sale. Sometimes I am asked if that is Yves Klein's Blue in the window? No, but we have 33 different shades of blue to choose from.  

My Moleskine to the rescue. That rock chunk is a piece of unmilled pigment - Burnt Sienna. 

They roast Raw Sienna in a big oven to get that color. It doesn't come that way out of the earth. And Terre Verte? The Old Masters loved it (they didn't have too many choices back then) . Now called Green Earth, but Terre Verte sounds classier. 

These are just a few of the Cadmium pigments - 22 different colors. They come packed in 100 gram bags - yes Metric system. That's about 3.3 ounces. Why is it when I'm in Paris, I never have any trouble with the Metric system in a patisserie..hmm

This is what our new store looks like on west 29th street. HUGE! The old store in Soho was about the size of my closet. You couldn't turn around and by the end of day I was coughing from pigment dust. If you'd love ❤️ to be covered in pigment visit the Holi Celebration in India and get it out of or into your system.

Hand-blown glass mullers for mixing your paint up. You will not be grinding the pigment. They already did that at the mill in Germany. You will just be integrating binder (linseed oil, honey, gum Arabic, egg tempera etc.) into the pigment. 

On the left is a pharmaceutical mortar and pestle. 

You can get one in a kitchenware store.

P.S. I made the pilgrimage to ROUSSILLON in '05 and wrote about it in May.

Bistro De Roussillon

In the pigment store we sell a beautiful French paint brush called the l'Indispensable. I've heard of American and British brushes being called mottler, flogger, squirrel mop, liner, One-Stroke, round, wash, filbert, flat, fan, bright but never THE Indispensable. It's true that many painters can't live without this brush so we're often out of them.

The café in a Provençal village is l'Indispensable, centrally located near the town hall, the church, the boulangerie, the weekly marché. You can come as early as 7am and stay into the evening. You eat a series of small snacks (le gouter) or have a coffee. It's a lively meeting place for local gossip and news or you can just hangout.
The ochre-colored Bistro de Roussillon has 2 terraces. One is in the back with a view of the surrounding hills. I sat in the front terrasse with an expresso, facing the main square, Place de la Mairie. I rarely drink coffee but the light bouncing off the little glass was seductive.The sun is another l'indispensable in Provence. Essential anywhere, the particular light in Provence effects every experiences. Rich, earthy colors surround you; the olives in the marché or on your plate, the walls of your house, the fields of lavender and tournesol (sunflowers) out your window. Or the expresso on a café table...
Jean-Phillippe and Dominique Lenclos specialize in the geography of colors. Their intent is to preserve the historic traditional colors of Roussillon and other landmarked places. Discover their wonderful series of books: Colors Of The World, Windows of the World, Doors of the World, Couleurs du monde,Couleurs de la France, Couleurs de l'Europe.