Morning in the Mist

We had one more day on our own at Haut Baran before the pastel painting group arrived, and the area gave us our first taste of what was to be the climate motif for our time in France: cool and rainy! Although we had been told to expect it to be extremely hot and dry here in July, the weather gods decided to surprise us. However, the local landscape was very beautiful in the mist, and provided lots of inspiration for pastel paintings done on site over the next week. And William and Rosalie's white horse sure did a good impression of a unicorn in the misty morning woods!

The Lot Valley has only recently become a tourist destination, and still has an unspoilt and rural feel. All the buildings are of the indigenous golden limestone, roofed with locally made red clay tiles, so the landscape is very consistent and picturesque. The soil is poor and very rocky, and is best suited for growing grapes (thus the famous red-black Cahors wines of the region), so every farm has its vineyard.


I also took my first in what would be a long series of photos of French windows, from the extremely rustic as shown here, to the sublime, festooned with incredible flowers (see later posts).
Somehow these backyard fowl seemed more chic than Canadian chickens! They had a "je ne sais quoi" and quite an attitude! They inspired me, on one rainy day later in the week, to attempt a painting of their produce--eggs!