Quince in autumn

 

This glowing quince is the latest small masterpiece by Julian Merrow-Smith - autumn encapsulated in warm greys and defiant yellow with scattered leaves. If you haven't discovered his Postcard from Provence showcase of his daily paintings, you must, and tout de suite.

 

It reminded me that I was going to report back on our quinces left in a bowl in the hall, and whether the dying fruit really did release a sweet aroma. The idea was that we would be welcomed by the natural perfume of coconut and pear, guava, musk and violet, perhaps even a hint of rose. Here's the post: The fragrance of quince.

 

Well...sad to say the experiment was not an overwhelming success. We travelled more in hope than expectation, and though the quinces have wrinkled prettily, there's not a great deal of scent. When I hold the fruit right up to my nose there's a delicately pleasant smell of pear - perhaps with a hint of ginger - but that's about it. Perhaps some quinces are more powerful than others and these are just not the right type. Still, worth trying. And the bushy tree did look beautiful in the spring.

 

I'd love to hear from anyone who has managed to achieve a room full of fragrance this way.

 

  

Cherries from Chauvet's Orchard

We climbed out and drank in the view. Lines of crimson vines swirled out like a pleated skirt from where we stood on chocolate ploughed earth. To the right a cherry orchard seemed to have been dipped in beetroot juice and there was a custard-coloured lake of wheat to the left. The scene was punctuated in the middle distance by a butternut squash tinted field and three trees in quince green. The slopes of Mont Ventoux rose up behind, a turban of pink clouds wound around its peak.

                           

                          From Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard

As soon as I opened this book by Ruth Phillips, I knew it was special. I’ve read it twice now, since mentioning it in my “Cross-Channel reading” post, and I will undoubtedly read it again. In this extract, Ruth and her husband, the artist Julian Merrow-Smith see for the first time, in autumn, the hamlet where they will settle in Provence. And we see it with them, such is the vibrancy of the description. The term “painting in words” might be overused, but it is precisely what Ruth Phillips achieves.

Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard is a passionate memoir of a painter who followed a dream, a wife who has her own artistic profession as a concert ’cellist yet becomes in addition, by default, his studio assistant, and their life together in an intense landscape of colour and light, nature – and love.

Each chapter is given the title of one of Julian’s Postcards from Provence, the daily paintings that have made his name – and what delights those titles are! Instantly, they give a delicious flavour of what is to come:  Pale Blue Iris; Two Pomegranates; Still Life with Summer Fruits…

In October 2008, the thousandth of these small oil paintings that glow with inner life was sold. That milestone was passed while Ruth was away, in northern France playing The Marriage of Figaro by night. Her idea was to write to everyone who had bought one of the pictures, and ask them if they would like to tell her a little about themselves, where they lived and what the paintings meant to them.

From these responses grew the structure of this book, though it is far more a portrait of her and Julian than it is about the buyers. They provide a very short introduction about themselves which gives Ruth the lead to explore the background to each work - how and where it was painted - in vivid personal scenes, shot through with colour and observation, sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, often painfully honest and intimate. This is no wide-eyed idyll. It is lyrical yet moving as she pulls no punches when writing about its darker corners: the days when the painter won’t paint, their struggle to have a baby.

Ruth Reading by Julian Merrow-Smith



This, for me, is what makes this such a rewarding read: it’s a book to lose yourself in, to feel as if you come to understand the personalities involved as well as the setting. Ruth Phillips is a gifted writer, alive to every nuance of tone and texture. I adored the richly-layered descriptive passages in which so much more than the superficial is encoded. 

   Julian presented the food. A fillet of sea bass with perfect griddle marks and a scattering of fennel picked from a nearby hedgerow. There were caramelized carrots, baby la ratte potatoes and a garnish of roasted tomatoes that had made a brief appearance in a painting that afternoon.

A perfect paragraph. It encapsulates so much unstated back-story: that Julian is an enthusiastic and excellent cook, that they gather wild food, the slow sweetening of natural produce, the conjunction of real life and Still Life in the immortalised tomatoes.

But you have to read it in context, because this vignette takes place amid a foul-mouthed onslaught by the French country neighbours from hell, in which Julian demonstrates that the classic British stiff upper lip is a potent psychological defence.

I highly recommend this engaging, lush, intensely visual yet thoughtful read. It will transport you to sunny uplands, lifting your heart along the way, though never losing sight of the realities of the hard road to fulfilment in any artistic or personal endeavour.

In February 2005 Julian Merrow-Smith started Postcard from Provence, a daily painting project at Shifting Light here. Each day he paints a small still life or landscape inspired by the countryside outside his studio, its fruits and everyday artefacts. All artwork on this post is his.

Oranges and lemons

          

           “In the kitchen, sunlight filtered through the movement in the leaves of the courtyard trees outside the window, rendering the white plaster walls inside diaphanous and transitory like fluttering muslin. A bright Christmassy scent of freshly peeled oranges was all around. I couldn’t think where it came from as we had only apples in the fruit bowl.”

                       

                                               From The Lantern



Julian Merrow-Smith is a classically-trained painter, and it shows in every brushstroke. In his small oil Citron de Nice, the lemon seems to glow from within while the light around is sombre. It has a timeless quality, like a beautiful detail from an Old Master.

Likewise, this clementine is so richly evoked that you can almost smell the zesty aroma released by the fruit as its peel is pulled away, and juice trembles on the membrane. Look at that pith, fluffed and exposed, and you can taste its distinctive bitterness. What a gift to be able to engage so many senses with paint on a flat surface!

I wrote about Julian in one of my very first posts on this blog, when I was getting about three visitors a day, and two of these almost certainly accidental. So for those who missed it first time round, here is the link to his Still Life with Figs.

Extraordinarily, he paints a picture of this calibre a day - normally from his studio near Crillon-le-Brave but sometimes from his wider travels. These encompass landscapes and, occasionally, portraits as well as still lives; they are then auctioned online.

So successful have these proved that 140 from the collection have been published as a treat of a book, Postcard from Provence, the dream-like countryside of southern France seen through the eyes of a contemporary yet very traditional artist. It is available here from Amazon, or from the painter’s website here, which also has details of the daily auction.

Still Life with Figs

This beautifully soft and luminous small painting by Provence-based artist Julian Merrow-Smith captures that moment the figs are on the point of bursting with sweetness. The black-purple skin is velvet to the touch but melting and glistening with juice.

It’s a sublime illustration of the following lines in the new book:

“The haunting began…one afternoon in late summer.

    It was one of those days so intensely alive and aromatic you could hear as well as smell the fig tree in the courtyard. Wasps hummed in the leaves as the fruit ripened and split; globes of warm dark purple were dropping, ripping open as they landed with sodden gasps.

   The pulse that pumped out the sweet, heady scent was quickening as I bent down to pick the fallen figs, then pulled them apart to find insects were already drunk on their scarlet hearts.”

From: The Lantern

Julian Merrow-Smith is a British painter living near Crillon le Brave, a tiny Provencal hill village at the foot of Mont Ventoux. An accomplished portrait painter, Julian regularly exhibits with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, and his paintings have been widely shown in Britain, France and the United States.

In February 2005 Julian started Postcard from Provence, a daily painting project at http://shiftinglight.com@ Shifting Light | Postcard from Provence
A painting a day: daily paintings from Julian Merrow-Smith's
studio in Provence. Each day he paints a small still life or landscape inspired by the countryside outside his studio, its fruits and everyday artefacts. The beauty of small things…