Sunrise on lavander
- 📍 Location: Plateau de Valensole, Provence, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
The little stone house with its cypress sits on the far side of the field and the rows run up to it, and that morning the sun came over the horizon to the right of it, clear of any cloud. Stopped down, it broke into a small hard star sitting on the skyline.
I framed wide and low so the nearest lavender is large and the rows narrow quickly towards the building. The house is deliberately small — it is the destination of the lines, not the subject of the picture, and making it bigger would have cost the field its depth.
The colour at that hour is not the purple people expect. It is a dusty lilac-grey with a warm seam along the top of each row, and I kept it there rather than pushing the saturation towards the version that sells postcards.
The distant ridge on the right is the Luberon, and it is in the frame for one reason: it stops the horizon from being a flat line and gives the whole plateau somewhere to end.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
