Paintings/writing

 PHOTO SAFARI

At our hotel in Ticino Switzerland there are a number of paintings that were nothing like the usual hotel art.  

After breakfast I went on a safari with my camera. If I were ever to teach another writing seminar, they would make great prompts for exercises.

My favorite kind of painting allows me to walk into a painting and pretend I live there or speak to whoever is there.

Here are paintings and off the top of my head stories ideas.

 

A horse and buggy amble down this French countryside road. One day the flowers will be oil, but today they just add to the brightness. There is a couple in the buggy coming back from the nearby village to their farm. They are new married and she is wondering if she's pregnant. She knows her husband doesn't want a child yet, and she's not sure she does. Her friend Marie knows of herbs that might end a pregnancy before it begins. She almost resents the bright happy faces of the sunflowers.

 

Hamish is a Scot who lives outside Edinburgh where he works in one the whisky factories. He goes to and from work on his bike, one of his most prized possessions. His home is a small one bedroom cottage and he's happy because he is able to give his wife and baby daughter a good home, enough food, decent clothes. There's not much extra, but there's enough. What he doesn't know is that his wife finds him boring: he works, he comes home, he eats, sometimes he goes to the pub, but more nights he goes to bed. Every Sunday they go to his mother's house. The couple's neighbor's son had just come back from India. Drinking tea with than she listens to his exotic tales. What would it be like to be a wife of an Army office in India? Is there anyway she can convince him to take her back with him?

Solonge is waiting for her lover Pierre. She is wearing a new blouse that she just bought because it goes so well with her best suit. They have been meeting every Thursday here for the past two years. Pierre is married. Solonge works in house of haute couture as an administrator. Today is the day she will give Pierre an ultimatum--your wife or me. She is prepared to accept his decision if it is his wife. She wants to be married herself and she knows she's not getting any younger and as much as she likes her job, of which she is extremely competent, she is ready for a change.

Poor Emily. She'd been for a long walk in the forest near her cottage when the heavens opened. She should have known better than not to have an umbrella at this time of year, where a sudden storm is more normal than good weather all day long. By the time she reached home, she was drenched. The wood that she put in the fireplace was dry and caught almost immediately warming the room. In a few minutes she will turn from the fire so her back will catch the heat of the flames.