Growing up in Eastern France meant for me a childhood in a town near Nancy and Metz in Lorraine and summers at my grandmother’s rural home in a small village in Alsace. School meant a classroom with multiple grades in one room with one teacher until I reached high school. I did not have much exposure to the world of fine art or art training. My museum was a poster of one of Bonnard’s L’Amandier en fleurs paintings taped to my bedroom wall. I always loved looking at paintings, but languages, culture, geography, food, and literature were my early passions then and to this day. Things changed when I spent a year as an exchange student outside of Boston. Now the museums and paintings were real, and exposure to making art was more than crayons and paper. Actually, we kids back in the day in France did not have crayons, we used pencils, and not many were colored.
As an undergrad studying in Paris, things opened up even more, and ever since then, I have been a museum and gallery junkie, an added passion. Living in Paris is living inside the history of art. It is part of the scenery and everyday conversations. Artists lived there, movements started there. My friends and I had coffee at the same café as did many of the celebrated artists of the past hundred years and more. We saw some contemporary artists at nearby tables. Books about art were everywhere in Paris, celebrating art history and stories. Our conversations were full of the names of artists, people and lives we knew and spoke of in passing: Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Chagall, Léger, Miró (to name a few ☺ ). The great Paris museums, both little and big, were filled with these artists’ works. Lucky me. Some of us even imagined being privileged enough to someday buy one of their works that were for sale at galleries we walked past every day.
Having an adult life in New York and Paris and traveling around the world for business and pleasure has given me an advantageous opportunity to feed my craving for museum and gallery viewing. The transition to making art took a lot longer but is a direct outgrowth of a lifetime of viewing painting and experiencing art in my mind.
After completing my sixth book, I put another book or two on hold indefinitely to finally explore my attraction to painting, typically by being “all-in.” No more painting just in my head. In Provence, with its startling light and painter culture, I acquired some training from various teachers who applauded my efforts.
Like generations of painters before me, I was tasked with copying the works of various masters as a training exercise. I remember a whole class of us working on a Matisse painting. I still have my amateurish version. Amusingly, a few years ago, while visiting Luciano Pavarotti’s home in Modena, Italy, which is preserved like a museum, what do I see on the wall? A copy of a famous painting that he had also painted (though not very well) that I had reproduced. It’s a small world. Well, not really. To me, the essence of art is that within each new work, the many creations that came before live inside it. Painting is a continuum where the past and present coexist, and all paintings share a connection. I’m reminded of this every time I visit a museum or gallery.
Something different about today’s artists and viewers is our ever-present smartphone camera. There was a time when taking photos of artwork was prohibited. Good luck. Unenforceable today. In fact, the plethora of photo-taking is a distraction to one viewing a popular painting in a public space. But what it does, at least for me, is give me a chance to revisit the experience of the painting through my photograph of it. Sometimes, months or years later, it becomes part of me. I don’t consciously copy it, but who knows what painting shows through mine in inspiration or execution? What the magic of playing with photos and enlargement can do is let one highlight and focus in on a small portion of a work of art. And I do confess to finding inspiration in some small corners of a canvas. I also like the way pointing a camera at a painting focuses my attention. Makes me see more sharply and differently than when the painting appears in the context of the paintings around it, which is another useful perspective.
I painted and painted and studied more in New York, but at that point, a host of professional painters encouraged me to just paint more and more every day as I was producing works they admired as “finished.” My confidence grew. By the time Covid hit and we decided to isolate in Provence, I had quietly been a full-time painter for years. I have hundreds of completed canvases…and new ideas. A trip to a museum—of which there continues to be many—is like a circus of ideas and emotions for me.
I don’t know if I would have made the move from pen to paintbrush had we not dropped an anchor in the South of France. I have always been drawn to the South—the colors, the light, the landscape, the food, the sea, the history, and culture. I am not alone. It led to us coming every summer to our home in a postcard-pretty village there. With time and space and stimulus in gardens and landscapes, I was inspired. Such painters of the South as Alfred LaTour, Matisse, de Stael, Cézanne, and Bonnard live inside me and my work. Van Gogh is something of a neighbor, having painted in our village and was institutionalized a half-dozen miles from where I paint (and he painted).
Some artists’ words have left a profound impression on me, but none more so than Van Gogh’s: “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
I never identified as a painter. Without much formal training in drawing, perspective, composition, or technique, these were never my instinctive strengths or primary modes of expression. My creative identity was firmly rooted in music, dance, and writing—realms where rhythm, movement, and narrative formed my artistic vocabulary. Sure, I play around with different forms and styles of painting, including figurative and realistic representational art. What’s not fun about painting a bird or a flower? But in my hands, it is a glass of vin ordinaire and not my taste or choice of style.
There are and have been plenty of other painters in our village. Art and exhibitions are all around. I don’t take myself too seriously, and to this day, I still don’t call myself a writer. When pressed, I use the term author. Painter? Well, I paint… a lot. It is not an uncommon sight in our village or in other select locations in the South to see amateur and professional painters with their easels and paints set up on a village street or country field. What talent. Indeed, there are small tour buses of them at times. I am fully aware of the masses of people, like me, who paint for pleasure, some remarkably well. I am especially aware, particularly when I am in New York, of the extraordinary talent that an extraordinary number of people have. Why are they not playing in the New York Philharmonic or singing wherever? They have the talent and skill. So, life isn’t always fair, and seizing opportunity is often harder than it sounds. This much I know: when I paint, I lose track of time and place. I am in a special zone that is like no other for me. I even like and feel fulfilled by some of my paintings. And no one quite sees things as I do through my eyes and experience. For all that, I am grateful.
When I came to painting, I found a resonance between color and emotion. I found a harmony in moods and seasons. It wasn’t happiness rooted in perfection or achievement, but in a freedom to create without expectation. Is this a selfish pursuit? Perhaps, but never intentionally so. It was never about proving anything, nor did it begin with any grand artistic ambition. It unfolded organically. There’s magic in those swirls and conversations between the brush and canvas. Amazing.
One day, a local painter offered me a simple yet profound insight: “Art enables us to find ourselves.”
Those words lingered. They echoed the philosophy I have long embraced—the same one I have shared in French Women Don’t Get Fat: the art of knowing oneself, of cultivating both body and mind, of savoring life’s pleasures with awareness and intention. Just as we learn to nourish ourselves physically, we must also nourish our creative spirit, allowing it to unfold in its own time, in its own way. And so I continue to paint.