Third Place, Professional Original; The Linda Calsing Award

Provence Pottery Shop is a memento of a delightful day spent in the town of Rousillon, where I wandered the winding streets, past shops and restaurants toward the hilltop cathedral.

This pottery shop is typical of the town’s décor – ochre colored stucco walls over age-old stone. Rousillon, a small town in the Provence area in southern France, is the site of an ochre quarry, known as a source for the orange/yellow/rust powders coloring the paint of artists’ palettes.

To capture the ochre color, I chose to use my actual photograph as the ground for my stitching. The photo plays an active role as the background surface, allowing stitches to have greater dimension as they migrate closer to the viewer in the foreground. Taken together, the photo and choice of stitches assist to create the perspective of the scene.

The strong colors of the burgundy bougainvillea trellis and brilliant blue pottery against the ochre wall provided strong contrast and peaked my interest to see what was inside the shop.

I thought their little colorful ochre patterned dish would be just perfect for olives!