Image of the Week: Hauts de Cagnes
© Durga Yael Bernhard
A few weeks ago I came across this small gouache painting. Painted en plein air from the home of one of my dearest and oldest friends, it shows a view of the Mediterranean Sea from Hauts de Cagnes, a medieval hilltop village that overlooks Cagnes-sur-Mer, a small coastal city in the French Alpes-Maritimes.
I can't believe twenty years have passed, this Tuesday, since I sat in that bright sunshine, mixing colors and listening to birds in the foliage that hung like hair over the balcony. I spent a week with my friend on my way home from a trip to West Africa. Her children were toddlers back then . . . the same boy and girl who tower over her now as young adults.
As a landscape painter, I love nothing more than the Mediterranean coast. Its tumbling topography, sparse underbrush, and seaward views make for interesting juxtapositions of near and far – a polarity that I never tire of painting. Large objects in the foreground form apertures through which small clusters of buildings and trees are visible in the distance. Different scales of textures and shapes attract and repel each other, both contrasting and relating. It's thrilling to capture this tension and bring it into harmony – an arrangement much like a small symphony, unique to each painting.
I wasn't the first artist to paint in this place. Chaim Soutine, a Russian-French painter of Jewish origin, lived in Cagnes from 1923-1925. He painted the very street my friend lived on – the charming Chemin des Caucours, with its crumpled hills and white houses with clay-tiled roofs. The painting (shown below) hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I was pleased to encounter Soutine's expressionist rendering of the familiar lane that I walked up and down two decades ago.
Seems like just yesterday . . . je me souviens. Merci, Dominique.
A good week to all –
D Yael Bernhard