Sea turquoise

"...water so clear the rocks at the foot of the cliffs looked like clumps of turquoise flowers growing on the sea bed."
                                                                    from The Sea Garden

The modern French painter Olivier Boissinot captures that turquoise by the shore, the brightness and heat of the sea in the South of France in his Calanque de Port Pin, above. A native of Provence, he is a master of strong colour and atmosphere. I love the way he composes a scene so cleverly, then seems to dive straight in with no-holds-barred vibrancy.

I've used his brilliant pictures from the start of this blog, to illustrate elements of The Lantern, and I'm only sorry I can't get to his latest exhibition at the Salle Cézanne in Meyreuil, near Aix-en-Provence. It's on now until February 7, and if anyone is there this week, it will be well worth seeing.

An if that's an impossibility, but you'd like to brighten your day, take a look at this: an online notebook of Olivier Boissinot's seascapes.

The Calanques: jazzy blue



A short boat ride from Marseille or Cassis are the magical calanques, deep cliff inlets like small fjords. For all the photographs and artworks that abound, it’s not easy to find images that do justice to their pure beauty, austere in places and yet lush in others.

But Olivier Boissinot’s exuberant paintings of the calanques pulsate with the vivid blues and oranges of a day so hot everything seems reduced to primary colour, and the heat and light sharpen every line. The eye is drawn deep into the myriad blues, in contrast to the baked rusty soil, until you can almost feel the beat of summer just by letting the picture work.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, Boissinot makes his work all about colour, the vibrant relationship of each shade to the one adjacent. The result is celebratory: of place and mood.

Here (below) is his masterly evocation of the high Calanque d’En-Vau. It seems the characteristic black outlines of his trees and rocks capture the dizzying effect of the height above the sea and the unrelenting sun.





   The calanque was below us, such a long way down. I shivered, involuntarily. On one vertical drop human climbers scrambled like lizards, searching out holds in the scarred rock faces of the cliffs. Turquoise water shifted far below, sprinkled with silver flakes.   

                                                                                             From The Lantern

To discover more of Olivier Boissinot’s work, which includes his travels in Morocco and the jazz clubs of New Orleans, click here for his website.