As I roll over these dry hills in Southern France and Spain, I frequently turn a corner and suddenly glimpse perfection before me: golden stone, turrets and towers, warm ochres streaked with red, cobalt shadows with speckles of viridian, twisted branches and larger forms dark-massing to the fore on the left, and mountains fading to gray-violet in the background. At that moment I want to paint. Moreover, that moment is what I want to paint: the initial glance when the farm-house (or monastery, or palace, or vineyard hut) is barely known, its angles and masses and hues not yet understood, and its present use and history a blank tablet on which the potential for romance and nostalgia is unlimited.

Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Goths, Visigoths, Saracens, Normans, and countless other peoples once upon a time swept in and over these Mediterranean lands. Here they loved and battled, befriended and betrayed, sculpted and sang, danced and died. The streaking in the warm ochre might just as well be tears or semen or blood. This is the land of troubadours and bullfights, of strong red wine, of dry bread and drier cheese, of crusades and courtly love, of bloody insurrections and more brutal reprisals.

Bits of this history swirl in my mind as I come to a stop and set up to paint. They continue to spiral as I study the scene and decide on how I will echo its beauty on the paper or canvas. As I begin to understand the angles, forms, hues and tones, some of the mystery and excitement I initially felt may drain out of me. But in my painting, jangling in the viewer a sympathetic resonance across time and space, is a record of the vibrations of joy, exhilaration, nostalgia, or pity that throbbed in me when I first glimpsed the scene. I paint that initial glorious impression of heat, wind, pungent grass and salt-sea, blistering golden stone, miserable cries of gulls and men; I paint the light of that implacable sun.