Innervision News
Chris Gilders
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We left our BBC television jobs to work in Europe, writing and publishing books, music and graphic novels.
Our mobile lifestyle has given us the opportunity to revisit Jenny's roots in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne and to swap apartments with friends in Brighton, Amsterdam, San Diego and Manhattan.
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Jenny Gilders
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For us, Nice has been an inspirational environment. We bought an apartment here which we exchange and have friends who like to do the same. Contact us if you'd like to spend some time on the French Riviera.
The Cote d'Azur, with its casinos, its nightclubs, its sports and social activities, its sumptuous hotels, fine restaurants, superb beaches, gorgeous climate, lovely gardens, amenable popsies and all the rest of the things that make life worth living, can be quite a field for exploration and test-drilling in itself. But beyond and behind the riviera's beaches lies a land hard to match in richness and variety of scene. With two hundred miles of coastline and an average north-south depth of half that much, Provence has snow-capped mountains and flowered alpine valleys to rival Switzerland; deep river gorges that match the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in scenic socko if not in size; in its Camargue marshlands of the Rhone delta the last wild horses of western Europe, pursued by cowboys who trap and lasso them; pretty farmlands, pasture, vineyard, orchard and fields of flowers grown for their perfume; industrious cities, unindustrious towns, villages too indolent to show up on a map; hot desert, cool forest, sunny plain; river, stream and lake; ghost towns, feudal fortresses, Greek theatres, Roman ruins, bull rings, movie studios, a Papal palace and the busiest and most colorful seaport of France; good wine, good food, good living in the land that Mistral named Empire of the Sun.
To say of Provence that it is enchanting is like dismissing the Cote d'Azur as a sunny place for shady people. You need better than average talent to do more than express an opinion about it. Some of those who have tried with one degree of success or another to find its colors on a palette are Van Gogh, Buffet, Chagall, Cocteau, Rouault, Vertes, Utrillo, de Segonzac, Van Dongen, Renoir, Picabia, Foujita, Dufy, Soutine, Derain, Vlaminck, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and my wife, a Sunday painter who has ripped enough canvas to pieces in artistic frustration to put a spinnaker on every sailboat in the Mediterranean and fill it with foul language. Provence is so incredibly beautiful and colorful and delightful from one end to the other, with so many different kinds of appeal at all times in all seasons at any hour and from any angle, that it drives you into eccentricity because of your inability to capture and express its charm in paint or poetry or prose, whatever medium you happen to be working with. Sometimes you feel like cutting off an ear.
A Rich Man's Guide to the Riviera, by David Dodge (Author of "To Catch a Thief")
