Roussillon, Domain du Bois de St. Jean, and a Painting Demo

Saturday, June 25th marked our second trip to paint the lavender fields.  The eleven of us jumped into our two SUV's with matching ribbons, (to keep track of each other), and headed for Roussillon.  The village is noted for its large ochre deposits found in the clay there.

In honor of the ochre deposits, the entire town is painted in the same tones, which makes it unique to Provence, where you will usually see pale colored houses with soft pastel shutters.

Our first stop was at the lavender fields on the outskirts of town.  If you check out my post on June 17th, you will see that we actually scouted this field out before the workshop, and we especially loved it for its sumptuous curves.  Our artists were delighted at the chance to paint it.  Among others, here's Brenda,

Nathalie...

Angel...

and Aleex.

We also had the owners of the field come and set up a stand right next to us, selling lavender soaps, oils and bouquets.

I know for sure we took quite a few bars of lavender soap off their hands that day!

After we finished up at the fields, we headed up to the town to eat lunch and browse through the shops.  They are known for selling artist pigments there in a wide variety of colors that can be mixed with a binder and used as either watercolor, oil or acrylic.  Of course I was most drawn to the blues and the greens, especially the aquamarine.

We all piled back in the cars and headed for our next stop, which was wine tasting at Domain du Bois de St. Jean.  We sampled an assortment of reds, as well as a white and a rose.  Our host spoke french, but the language of wine is universal.  LOL.  PS Julie translated.

An anecdote is that Brenda, one of the Artists on the retreat, was here at the workshop for her second time.  Last year she did a painting of our host at the vineyard, and sent him a poster after the workshop.  This year, he brought out the poster, and she got to have her picture taken with him.  Pretty awesome!

We purchased some very nice wines for dinner that night, and took a sneak peek at the vineyard in the back on the way out.

We returned to the Chateau for an outstanding dinner of Legumes Farci,

along with a special cake in honor of the Artists.

which we enjoyed outdoors.

We finished off a very full day with a fun and informative demo from Julie Snyder, about how to take your reference photos home and turn them in to finished works, using your iPad. 

And so ends another great day with Workshops in France.
Thanks so much for following!!

Love, Linda