“Un Humoresque d’Apres Midi” (Pezenas; France)
Pencil, pastel, & watercolor
2024. FOR SALE: $200 (Please email dterrydraw@aol.com or private message if interested in purchase).
Like many small towns in France, Pezenas obviously had a distinct (if rather brief) heyday/high point. Just look at the buildings. Pezenas’s glory-days were in the 17th century…..when Moliere, among others, took refuge there. It’s very pretty, but (despite the grand buildings) markedly slow-paced, underpopulated, and quite enjoyable.
I took the originating photograph for this painting in 2012 or so, as I sat outside the small, provincial hotel, which someone, in a burst of unlikely enthusiasm, had glaringly re-decorated in the early 1970’s…..all avocado/harvest-gold/&green shag carpet, cheap mirrored tiles (chipped), and suspended globe-lamps.
As for the scene?….I sat there, reading, for over an hour (as I recall, Herve was napping). The busking (obviously) couple across the street was practicing in an on-again/off-again way. The old man would appear every ten minutes or so and holler down at his daughter……irritatedly asking when she was going to come upstairs and start making His Dinner before she went out that night. She kept shouting back up at Papa to go make his own damn dinner. Maman was nowhere to be seen.
It was one of those comforting moments when I realized that this wasn’t very much at all different from an afternoon back in East Tennessee.
