Crossing Borders

Our journey has begun. 300+ miles north. Lunch at Tebay (in the rain - saw some ducks in a row, but couldn't get a good enough picture to support the joke). Now we are in a hotel - picked solely on the basis of travel time to it today and from it tomorrow - just south of Glasgow, just off the M74, just a few yards back from constant heavy traffic on the feeder road. Such glamour

I went in search of something to create a picture. Photographers here would probably make something of the artificial ivy on the planters on front of the hotel (artificial ivy is a thing?), or the complex metal structure bracing the boiler flue against Scottish gales, or even the wind blown larches struggling in the wasteland beyond the courtyard fence. I confess that in the sunless gloom they all defeated me. Returning to the rather utilitarian, and entirely deserted (think Hitchcock, think Kubrik), interior of the hotel, with its mix of brown, grey and chrome, this one splash of colour stood out

I'm not artistically educated enough to know if it is significant or not, so I took a picture, to Google it. It turns out it is a print of a Marc Chagall, called 'Fleurs de St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat (Paysage méditerranéen)'. Pleased that at least my attention was drawn by something with quality, I googled some more. He was born into poverty in the Tsarist Russia empire - actually Belarus - we all know where that is now. Being from a large, religious Jewish family, he was subject to oppression and pogrom that directly threatened his life. Nevertheless, he won an artistic scholarship to Paris and, after the mandatory period of poverty in an artist's quarter, his career took off,and he became a major figure in 20th century European art, hovering between impressionists and cubists and surrealists and symolists.

Anti-semitism (and anti-modernism) caught up with him again, of course, in the 1930s and he escaped to the US until nazism was defeated. His wife died suddenly while they were in exile and he returned to France alone in 1948, living on the Mediterranean coast, where this was painted, including an image of a fishing boat - the occupation of his father

What a life story. Travel broadens the mind, they say