18" x 24" Oil/Wood

The mistral, defying the triserial predictions, raged for four days.  Then I began to understand better its imprint on the land, how cultivation had been defensive; cypresses used as screens for vulnerable crops, walled gardens for early-budding flowers, villages built into the wind’s lee on southern slopes, with narrow streets walled off at the perimeter.  Because this was a late mistral, it caught the fields of lavender and lavandin (a less fragrant hybrid) as they were coming into color and created effects of strange beauty, whole hillsides liquid in waves of color.  Such is my memory of the mistral with the wind at my back, urging me on to Spain while it remained domiciled in France.

A mistral is generated when two vast rotations of pressure converge:  high pressure over the mountains and plateaus west of the Rhone and, to the east, a low-pressure storm system over the Alps and northern Italy.  The Rhone Valley acts as a funnel between these two systems, drawing down cold, desiccating air from the Alps.  The wind can be miles high, and it gathers force as it roars toward its nemesis, the Mediterranean.

I could see only one effect immediately.  The sky was rinsed clean of haze.  This produced a stark, intense light that seemed to curb or even eradicate shadows.  Where there was shade it was suddenly chill.  This polarization of light and temperature driven by violence was, I suddenly realized, very familiar—it invests the final landscapes of Vincent van Gogh.

A few days later, in the remnants of the Plaine de la Crau southeast of Arles, with the mistral tearing across the last fields before the sea and the cut grasses as yellow as corn, I was looking at van Gogh’s palette, needing only art to intervene.  Van Gogh’s derangement, whatever its cause, must have embraced the whiplashed intensity of light as soul mate.

The blaze of colors he found when he arrived in Provence was not inert, and his olive trees have the gnarled ligaments that come from fighting the mistral year after year.

The mistral is a living force, blowing grit in your face and perspective into your vision.  It shapes the lands of the Rhone as profoundly as history.  Often, it drove people to extremes.

Provence, France
By Olivia Cameo Lewis, 2004