Stripes

In 2014-15, I spent six months in the small American town of Saint Francisville in the state of Louisiana. I lived in a not-very-big mobile home located on a very beautiful piece of property, belonging to my friend Kenwood, who runs a bed & breakfast. He feeds the deer that shyly appear in the soft evening light to feed, and tall cypresses guard the property, which is a poetic mixture of wild nature and manicured garden. My mobile home was parked permanently at the foot of a picturesque hill.

I taught myself to paint with oils and painted outside during that winter. I had created a clever system to allow my pictures to dry without the resident animals getting to the half-finished paintings. 

Almost every day, I bicycled to Highway 61 to do my shopping and every time I passed the West Feliciana Detention Center. One day the yard was full of inmates, all dressed in jumpsuits printed with wide black and white stripes. It was an outlandish sight in the middle of this small, quaint American town.