In its pictural aspect, ”Natural Dreamer” tries to make the spectator feel the heat coming up from these landscapes : vertically framed snapshots, shade, grazing lights, catching light and colours as a painting.
Drome Provençale
These photographs are based landscapes from the countryside of Drome, structured by the humain hands, landscapes shaped by plantations of vines, crops, aromatic plants.
The treasures of this market-gardening agriculture are in the interplay between patches of land, springs and rivers, plantations of fruit trees, mulberries and truffle oaks. Here reigns an atmosphere of a nourishing earth, sown and tilled.
In its pictural aspect, ”Natural Dreamer” tries to make the spectator feel the heat coming up from these landscapes : vertically framed snapshots, shade, grazing lights, catching light and colours as a painting.
Drome, Natural Dreamer
This series is probably the most oriented towards my childhood, towards these hours looking after our goats. Shepard is a strange work : It probably developed my taste for observation and encouraged my dreaming spirit tied up to my pole.
Spring is a very happy time : the goats have plenty of foodstuff and do not run from one end of the country to the other one like in summer time, the sun is kind, the grass soft and high is a marvellous mattress, the sky is deep blue and carries big white light clouds, the new baby goats like to climb over you, playing.
All this has gone but I shall keep in mind the immense pleasure produced by the different green colours of grass, new leaves and all the different texture between deciduous trees and the darker but fragrant pines.
I wanted to share this pleasure of looking around us. The series linger on to summer time, intense heat, to lavender and that so particular blue-purple.
At work
When I am working I start with an idea : make landscape photos with a vertical frame; green colour; the sky; a river. You work, you look for something; you find, you don’t find any more, you work, you search; you find and one day, as you would finish reading a book, you take the ending picture. Surprisingly, I remember very well this moment. I shot it in Rousset-les-Vignes, in Drome, not far from our place. I had been going round and round all the afternoon long taking average pictures. And I came to this place as if I felt it was the right moment, I loved this view.
A small valley bellow the village, I parked my motocycle, an old Pan European, and I found summed up in front of me my will to live. All along this work I had somehow felt that trees in the landscapes could be compared to characters, in the way it adapts his environment. This one strong and high in the rich lands and this one fighting for life cracking rocks with its roots, growing where nobody is waiting for him.
That day in Rousset, I found my self-tree, its foliage dynamic as swirl, overlooked obedient layers of stones. On the opposite side some gregarious reeds, some lines of vines in the foreground. Far away, we can see a magnificent shading of blue mountains which throw you high up in this late afternoon sky.
After this photograph, I had said what I intended to say and I was happy.
Other series
I Need Colour !
Facing the elements
