Gift from a Friend

September 2001

While we were waiting to fly back to the States after September 11 Jim and I traveled around Provence.

Although it was a nervous and uncertain time we found moments of quiet certainty.

Like the afternoon we visited Paul Cezanne's studio outside Arles. They have preserved it so that you  feel his presence in this charming place. 

 The shelves in his studio are crowded with the familiar objects he arranged and rearranged in his paintings over the years. I recognized objects from paintings I had studied in textbooks and seen in countless museums since my first art history class in the 1970s at Dunbarton College of the Holy Cross in Washington, DC. At a time when I felt disconnected from home - I felt welcomed by the comforting familiarity of Cezanne's old furniture and odd vases and clocks.

Sitting in his garden on a warm afternoon was a sweet time.

These settling connections in strange places are what I love about art.

Near-by was Mt. St. Victoire - the large rock face mountain Cezanne painted over and over.

Steady as a rock.

All is well.

Art is often such a rock-certain center for me.

The blessings of Art in my life came when a neighbor in Oxon Hill, MD handed me charcoal and paper and took me to an art class in artist, Jessalee Sickman's old style studio on Eye Streen in Downtown Washington.

In 1965 this friend opened a wonderful new world for me.  

Thank you, Pat Morgan. Where ever you are, thank you.

In 1968, I enrolled at Dunbarton College as an art major.