Exhibition on Art Therapy at St Rémy de Provence

I am uploading these photos rather late, but bettwe late than never as they are very relevant to the work I have been doing recently. I went to St Rémy de Provence where a small exhibition featuring 40 works by clients at the St-Paul asylum. The whole exhibition was very moving and the works were fascinating, they really documented art's capacity as a language for expressing one's emotions, thoughts, feelings, moods etc.

My studio : Pictura

ESBAM

This is ESBAM, the art school where I have been spending the last few months. It is a world away from Camberwell College of Arts in Peckham. At first glance, it may look like ESBAM would be the obvious preferred choice to study painting, it is in an idyllic location; a stones throw from the famous Calanques, the stunning coast line. Pine Trees surround the art school and it is layed out completely differently to Camberwell.
The original building was in fact designed to be an art school by regional artists in 1874 so studio blocks are dotted around in square building form, with each block acting as a studio for painting, drawing, sculpture, graphics etc.
It is a very old and dishevelled art school. You enter a painting studio and it looks like a tornado hit it twenty years ago, there are flying canvases all over the place and very old easles in bits on the floor. Camberwell seems extremely organized and structured compared to ESBAM. There is no blackboard site in Marseille you have to rely on word of mouth and the occasional email you receive from the Erasmus coordinator. It is infernal to find a tutor. They do not come in everyday or even every week, they only decided to put their times up on studio the wall in November, and so I then found out they only come in a couple of times a month. So you realize as a student at Esbam you really have to motivate yourself to work, find the will within you and try and hunt for a tutor in order to get any help or advice. II suppose the whole stereotypical south of France blazé arty atmosphere is part of Esbam’s charm, the students stroll in at 4 and leave at 6, smoke joints in boiler suits in front of really over sized abstract canvases. The school is absolutely mental but still great!

Aix-en-Provence

Before my course started I made the most of Marseille’s fantastic location to go and explore the cities, towns, and villages that surround it. Aix-en-Provence is only half an hour away from Marseille, but I could not find two cities as opposite as the two; historically, culturally, and most of all socially! The habitants of the two ‘dislike’ each other to put it nicely. Aix is very very pretty, picturesque, almost too beautiful, Marseille is much more of a real city, that gets dirty, almost but too dirty unlike Aix which happens to also be very bourgeois and conservative. Aix is the second most expensive city in France after Paris and there is also a certain snobbishness just like the infamous parisians.
Although I have to say, I admit to being a typical Aix-en-Provence sucker, I love it! I usually don’t like to use the word delightful in case of sounding ridiculously posh but wandering round the old town of Aix really is such a delight, it is so picturesque and it is a very uplifting town (unlike Marseille) the streets are flooded with cafes, boutiques, antique shops, very overpriced clothes shops, trillions of tempting restaurants, it just has everything a stereotypical tourist would seek! So this does explain why everyone abroad comes to Aix and knows of Aix no one really goes to Marseille. I love both for their own reasons, but I find it very refreshing having Aix so close by , if I ever have enough of grubby Marseille I can just hop on a bus and stroll around the old town of Aix, taking a note of amazing market day on Saturday!

St-Remy : Saint-Paul de Mausolée Asylum

Vincent Van Gogh arrived at the Saint-Paul de Mausolée asylum, out of his own will, from Arles. He was fascinated by the quality of the light and the beauty of the landscapes in Saint-Rémy which really inspired him and his year in the asylum ended up being the most creative of his life, he carried out 143 oil paintings and more than 100 drawings in a mere 53 weeks.
When I visited the hospital in the beginning of October, I found it a really touching and endearing experience. The hospital is still in fact running, but there is a section cut off for tourists where you can go and visit Van Gogh's room and a little exhibition of his time there has thus been set up. It was all so peaceful, quite eary and disconcerting, and looking at the landscape around nothing seems to have changed since the time of Van Gogh's years, you can still recognise the swirly trees in his paintings and the different shades of green in the fields

. Visiting the monastery was really an amazing oppurtunity I would strongly advise anyone to go and see it!

VISIT TO ARLES

View of the beautiful Rhones in the city of Arles