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Last Monday I crossed the English Channel and now I need a new studio…

I sailed on 19,500 tons of  Brittany Ferries new “Amourique” then stayed my first night near Redon.
I have the keys to a friends house where I often help out while passing through, then eventually found my way back to Itzac in the Tarn, Midi Pyrenees.Geoff_n_Wendy_HouseIMG_5767_wp.jpg
I have been mostly cleaning my house since. How do so many spiders and so much dust get in a closed house ~ and 3 frogs in the bathroom?
The picture of my cottage was taken last year before the house warming but balloons apart the place has not changed much for 50 years and was in 1825 the village forge.Soir_de_la_Fete__ma_maison_IMG_4606_wp.jpg
Yesterday re started painting, a large landscape painting and a marine painting, a new “Trafalgar Dawn”.
The previous painting sold for about £6,000.00 but that was 15 years ago and went on to become a successful, popular print.
We have a few copies left of this numbered signed edition (guaranteed not signed by any of the original officers and crew).
You can order your copy of this most striking painting, easily and securely from page:trafalgardawn_8.41_MB_1__compressed.jpg

http://www.frickers.co.uk/prints.html

Where before we were with the crew onboard HMS Victory, this time we will be with the French flagship Bucentaure with Admiral Villeneuve  his officers and men.
The new painting which has been researched over some 10 years, will have a much darker more threatening sky as we look away from not towards the dawn as per the original “Trafalgar Dawn” http://www.frickers.co.uk/marine-art/trafalgar_dawn.html so they should make a good pair.
~
We in the Tarn today also have a dark sky here with intermittent very heavy rain.
People here say they have never known such bad weather in  May and June in the Tarn; where is summer they say?.
I have painted out side in this kind of weather in the Tarn

http://www.frickers.co.uk/landscape/hot_rain.html being an example,Heavy_rain__CdM_IMG_0043_d.JPG

but no one remembers the rain being so persistant in May and June.
~
Today being Saturday, Saturn’s day or Shabbat, you choose,  I try not to work and not to do what I normally do.
I am not an “observant” or religious person, but like to put at least one day a week aside as special from work, besides if I was  religious I’d probably become an “authority” and it seems to  me we have enough experts on religion!
Also my vision of “G-d”, the Great Spirit is much too 21st and 22nd century for the religious establishments leaning towards what is the nature of the creature/being, why does it have such a bad press these days, why would it be interested in us?
After reading and thinking on the issues for 40+ years, on and mostly off,  I am as likely “right” as they are maybe more so…?
I am quite well read in Christian and Jewish philosophy, the New Testement, bits of the Koran, the Torah and Mishnah, also Jewish and other “religious” history so while not “Religious”, I feel I can speak with some sense and with a reasonable broad education behind my thoughts.
~
Thus this afternoon I drove my car to Albi, a nice town of some 90,000 inhabitants the oldest part of which picturesquely straddles with 3 old bridges the River Tarn and today is best know for a world class museum on Toulouse Lautrec and a much more modest but excellent little museum devoted to another son, Laperouse, the navigator and discoverer, the French answer to James Cook.
Albi has a long history going back at least as far as Astrix the Gaul.
Albi used to be famous for woad, the blue dye notably brought to the worlds attention by naked Britons who painted in the stuff, parading on England’s beaches in particular to oppose Julius Cesar and his mates in if I remember correctly, 64 B.C.E.
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I needed some food and urgently, an important part to protect my computer, a voltage regulator.
The electrical current in the remote parts of the Tarn is very unreliable.
I learnt the hard way it is not just the powercuts and spikes.
Equally damaging are the minor surges and fluctuations which gradually blow out vital components in any unprotected PC.
Not helping is a very unreliable upper floor electrical circuit in my cottage.
I’ve been asking my landlords to do some thing for over a year and quite often for the past 4 months… so far zilch.
I have surge protection but did not realise this was not enough so lost my No2 PC worth new some £700.00 plus software.
As my landlords are both lawyers I entertained no hopes of sympathy, apologies or regrets for my loss and was not in this case disappointed!
It has though in effect added 100 Euros per month to the cost of being here plus the inconvenience.
Ce la vie, they are basically pleasant people and I was grateful, to have their help when I urgently needed a studio so lets notch that down as yet another to experience.
I can’t help recalling though that “experience is what you get when things are going wrong“!
Fortunately thanks to the skill of the lads at SPC, Exeter Street Plymouth, my data was saved and installed on a now rather full No3 computer which with more memory added is promoted despite being 10 years old to No2 computer.
Maybe it will do ok as it has had this job before?
~
The countryside, hills and forests here looks beautiful even with the rain, moist with green and pink mists.
Visibility was about 2 km under low green grey wind swept skies and lost some times in very heavy rain squalls.
Itzac to me now means loneliness.
I too am very fed up with living alone.
I also wish to leave Itzac for some where with more people and a better studio.
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I have studio problems not solutions which do not help my work.

There is a demand for me to paint larger pictures.
I have run  into a problem with viewing distance.
Viewing distance is a critical component when working on larger sizes of painting, lack of causes perspective and colour relationship issues which waste valuable time and arrest momentum when inspiration flows.
The pictures need at least 15′.
I’m working generally with lack of space 6′  only for me in the present studio so trying to view work in progress is fraught, to dry larger paintings and groups of paintings in the studio is also becoming progressively more difficult’
~
So, who has a property to rent or otherwise trade out to a house friendly, formidable artist?
Hey it might get you a blue plaque ~ Gordon Frickers, Marine artist lived and worked here 2010 – ? ~ and add value to your property!