Sitting with the windows closed (on another hot day, with pollution levels leading to speed restrictions on main roads) to cut the roar of traffic, especially the hordes of bloody motorbikes, and electric drills, etc. I wouldn't mind escaping to a nice calm island myself :-)
"sisley's painting is charming, the english influence pastellises and washes some of the emotional intensity seen in van gogh or other continental painters, with their more passionate colours and tones."
There wasn't much English influence, Sisley was brought up in France, spent a few years in England before abandoning a career in business, to return to France to study in Gleyre's studio with some of the other Impressionists and then worked and socialised with them and his work is quite similar to theirs.
Van Gogh is usually identified as a post-impressionist and early Expressionist - it wasn't just a matter of him being a "continental" painter. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
There wasn't much English influence,
in the blood, innit!
does anything else differentiate his work from his gallic comrades?
that quality is slightly tenderer, shyer, more ethereal. he uses their techniques, but it comes out less 'in your face', imho, still largely suggestive but a little less direct.
(playing art critic on the internet, lol)
the problem i found with island life is the spell only lasted 10 years or so, then you wake up to how much people living at powers' periphery suffer from that fact, the happy ones don't think about it much...
wishing you a peacefully sybaritic, low decibel day ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
