primeview - PRIME - page 4 (Personal Experience)

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PRIME: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE continued

As a young adult, I travelled abroad, and perchance, lived in America for a number of years. It was there, working alongside artists of different backgrounds, and in a climate of four distinctive seasons, that I found colour, and light, was given a very different treatment. Vast open skies, often the sun directly overhead; presented distinctive edges, and a sharper focus, as the iris of my eyes narrowed in the brilliant sunlight. It was a stark contrast to an England of "pea-soups", that almost yellow smog that I had experienced in the Thames Valley, or the over cast skies and diffused sun-light appearing from east to west, just above the English horizon.

"Sunflowers" Vincent Van Gogh August 1888, London National Gallery

Market Gardens Vincent Van Gogh August 1888, Amsterdam, Vincent Van Gogh Museum

In later years, I travelled through southern France on my way to Spain. Observing field upon field of sunflowers, I recalled, that this was the land in which Vincent spent a brief period of self-imposed exile, capturing amongst other things, the open landscape, brilliant yellows and the pale blue-greens of the summer haze. Imagine my delight when walking through the upper gallery of Musée d'Orsay, Paris, some months later, to find a room full of Vincent's work, and to realise that he had been honest with the use of his colour in terms of the paint, made available to him.