So. We’d found two galleries; distributed our excess baggage into two new suitcases and flew back to Paris. There we spent a long morning in the C.D.G. Airport, slept on the train back to  Montpellier, got home, unpacked, slept and woke up the next day feeling like…

DEATH.

After the jet lag and residual “amazing” food lag gradually died away I began to think of the huge amount of work we had to do… choosing the work to send back to the gallery in the U.S.

Watercolour by David McEwen

When I go out with other painters to the various villages and places of outstanding natural beauty we have here. I not only teach but I paint as well. So after twelve years, I do have alot of small to medium sized watercolours in various portfolios to choose from. Some I like, some, as one Victorian writer put it, ” Look upon them, I dare not.”  Because they’re not very good. (Not every painting one does is worthy of wall space.)   So I looked through a huge amount of sketches, and fully worked paintings and made piles of work labled:
- Probable
- Possible
and
- I don’t believe I could paint that badly

I asked Sally to check them over and make her choice. That done I went on to the next, and most delicate stage…making a photographic record.

The Photos.

As you, dear readers, get to know us better, you will realise that Sally and I are under the cruel thumb of Kate, a former U.S. Marine sergeant (who built this site). Kate was a professional photographer who nags me endlessly about my shortcomings with a camera and tells me about f-stops, settings and things. I nod, smile and point the thing, press a button and hope for some gaurdian angel to protect me from her wrath. I’m a Luddite and am quite happy with the mid-nineteenth century and use cameras as a tool to record a scene or my work, for me its not an art form. For Kate ( Mistress of the lash ) it is an object of celestial beauty. (I will bang on at length about the uses of a camera for the painter, it’s enough to say for now that I think anyone who says things like, ” a real painter never uses a camera,” is balmy!)

So. I set up the camera shoot. It was a slightly overcast day but with enough light to work with as I placed my sturdiest easel at right angles to the floor, my sturdiest tripod with camera at right angles to the image. (Kate’s smiling and nodding so far.) I used to photograph them on the wall from any angle…that way I got foreshortened, distorted images, but I thought then, hey, it’s good enough. Put what I prayed was the right setting ( Raw something or other ) and started to photograph about eighty watercolours and medium sized oils.

They’re O.K. for me…for Kate, well that’s another day’s story.

Packaging and delivery is in the next episode.