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robert
collins
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Lachassagne In September 2001 I was invited to paint at the wonderful old chateau of Lachassagne in the Beaujolais region of France, north of Lyon. I was there for two weeks while the grapes were being harvested and the wine making process got under way. It was a delightful trip, I was made most welcome by the family who look after the estate, but the weather was not on my side. On my journey south I had flown over a band of cloud that covered all of northern France. It moved very slowly south with the result that I spent the first days of my stay trying to paint in the spells of sunshine between the clouds. Eventually, when it started to rain, I retreated indoors and set up some still life compositions using grapes from the fields with local breads and cheeses. It was on the Thursday of my second week that the sun came out again and I decided to paint two views from the top of the wonderful tower that stands, thirty metres tall, surrounded on three sides with magnificent trees, in the south western corner of the estate. I had two days left in which to work and began a painting looking south during the afternoon and one looking west as the sun went down in the early evening. There was a lot of wind and I had to strap down my painting equipment (a canvas and an easel and a small table to hold my palette with oil paints). Friday morning, my last day on the estate, turned out bright and calm and clear and it was with much excitement and in anticipation of a good final day's work that I walked with my equipment up to the tower. This was the first calm, clear, sunny day in two weeks and the male wood ants decided it was just the day to go looking for a mate. The huge swarms of male ants, which fly just once in search of a female, were drawn to the top of the tower. Ants from nests across the woods below me all timed their flights together with the result that I found myself trying to paint in an increasingly dense cloud of ants and after two hours my painting, the palette, my rucksack and bag of food, were all crawling with them. The floor of the platform round the top of the tower, where I was working, was covered with a thick layer of dying ants. There must have been tens of thousands of them with more and more still in the air which was thick with darting specks of black. There were so many ants that I could smell them. I was desperate to finish my painting but after two hours I could stand the nightmare no longer, I had ants all over me, inside my clothes and in my ears and mouth. I gave up, grabbed my equipment, threw much of it down to the ground and retreated with the rest as I could. When I got back to the chateau, which was about a mile from the tower, I had a shower and calmed myself down. After an hour and a half I found the courage to return to the tower to see if I could complete the second painting from a window lower down . I could not find the shirt I wore for painting so I crept to the top to see if it was still there. To my amazement the air was clear of ants though the floor was still thickly covered with the dead and dying. My shirt was still hanging where I had thrown it, on a ledge around the tower, six metres from the ground. As I write it is still hanging there. But I finished the second picture. .......Five years later I have revisited the chateau and found my shirt at the base of the tower in amongst the dry leaves and wood litter. It is misshapen and dried out like a piece of old crushed and crumpled card. I brought it home. It still has dead ants in it. Visit the chateau website here .... www.lachassagne.com |