Last week I took a walk above the village my folks live in, with Elstir – their Shetland sheep dog – and made a couple of quick sketches. The one here on the right is of the Baulmine, a stream that has its source about 3/4 of the way up the mountain.
It has been highly canalized over the years because of the amount of water that comes down with the spring thaw as well as during big storms. The size of the rocks the water can carry during those moments is quite impressive, but its a bit late in the season for that now. I’ve drawn it off and on now for nearly 30 years watching the stream bed and its environment changing with time, tamed by man; or at least it seems.
Above it all is the Mont de Baulmes with its cliffs that can tower when the light is right but not always. The biggest cliff has a face that is hard to not see, an old fossilized divinity perhaps, or just the evidence of how our brains project what we perceive. Either way it’s a face I’ve never been bothered by, sculpted as it is in stone and just abstract enough to avoid any unfortunate resemblance.
A little quiz: can you guess the name of the village?
:-)