Architectural Stripes in Provence Light
Field Notes from Arles: Colour, Light and Vertical Stripes
These large-format works show Harry MC’s practice expanding his stripe language into sharper, hard-edged forms shaped by the light and geometry of Arles and the Luma campus. Developed through long-running Provence fieldwork, part of his wider World of Stripes practice, the artworks translate architecture, shadow and Provençal colour into precise vertical sequences, each stripe isolated against white ground so every plane reads with clarity.
Lignes d'Arles #3, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 100 inches
Lignes d'Arles #4, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Lignes d’Arles series - Large Format Clean-Edged Stripe Paintings
Lignes d’Arles is Harry MC’s newest body of large-format stripe paintings, built from the colours and vertical structures found across Luma Arles and the surrounding Provençal landscape. Each work takes a reduced palette - olive greens, ochre reds, Provençal blues, pale greys, a flash of pink - and sets them as evenly spaced colour lines on white ground. The stripes stay sharp and architectural, but the colour shifts carry the warmth of southern light.
The series represents a more architectural form of stripe painting within Harry MC’s practice. Rather than the softened, hand-drawn edges of other works, these pieces embrace clarity: wide bands of evenly proportioned colour, each lifted from the surrounding Provençal environment. The white ground behaves almost as a Mediterranean wall, a surface on which colour can breathe, expand and contract. While rooted in observation, the paintings avoid literal representation. They draw instead from architectural rhythm: the vertical pull of Gehry’s Luma tower in, the stacked apertures of Arles façades, the intervals between shutters, drainpipes and shadows. The resulting works sit comfortably within the tradition of hard-edged abstraction, while retaining the warmth and chromatic intensity characteristic of Harry’s wider stripe language.
Lignes d'Arles #5, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Lignes d'Arles #8, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 100 inches
Provence Fieldwork & Colour Structure
Harry MC has worked in Provence for more than two decades, building a large visual archive of colour sequences, architectural rhythms and atmospheric light. His fieldwork extends from the stone alleys of Arles and the metallic surfaces of Luma, to the ochre quarries of Roussillon and the coastal brightness of the Camargue. Each location becomes a supplier of chromatic information: a shutter’s faded turquoise, the red-ochre façade of a 17th-century townhouse, a narrow band of dusty violet caught in the shadow of a Roman arch. The Lignes d'Arles series, hard-edged architectural stripe paintings are the latest refinement of this research. Where other works softened the boundaries between colours, these compositions clarify them - wide, evenly spaced verticals with a white ground acting as both stabiliser and pause. The result is a series that feels simultaneously structural and luminous, grounded in architecture yet open to the changing temperature of Provençal light.
About the Series
Together, the architectural stripe paintings and the photographic studies form a single body of work centred on the experience of colour in place. Rather than depicting Provence, the works distil its structures - the way light fractures on metal, the way stone absorbs warmth, the way shutters, windows and drainpipes create quiet repetitions across an old town wall. The result is a contemporary form of colour architecture: vertical sequences built from observation, refined through practice, and grounded in the shifting brightness of the south. The Lignes d’Arles paintings and Luma photographs shown below grow out of longer fieldwork across Provence, walking Saint-Rémy, Arles and the surrounding landscape with a stripe painter’s eye. For more on that research, including the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole interiors and backstreets of Arles that sit behind this architectural work, see Provence Fieldwork.
Luma Arles: A Conversation Between Architecture and Abstraction
The influence of Luma Arles extends beyond colour. Gehry’s tower offers a constantly shifting demonstration of how vertical planes can behave under changing light. Morning sun produces cool sheets of silver-blue; midday pushes the facets toward white heat; late afternoon drops deep bronze and violet down the tower’s sides. These variations echo the internal logic of stripe painting, a sequence of verticals undergoing continuous modulation.
The building’s internal exhibitions further contribute to this dialogue. Large-scale photography, installation art, experimental film, sculpture and architectural retrospectives occupy the galleries each summer, often spilling out into the Parc des Ateliers. The breadth of contemporary work shown at Luma reinforces the building’s role as a catalyst, a site where material, colour and structure continually recombine.
From the top floor, where panoramic windows look out across the tiled roofs and pale stone streets of Arles, the view forms a natural companion to the paintings. Below lies a geometric mosaic of warm surfaces; above, a sharp line of sky; between them, the city arranged in long, quiet verticals, a composition already leaning toward stripes.
Gehry’s tower rising above the stone-clad base of Luma Arles, its angular steel and glass sections catching fragmented light above the Parc des Ateliers. In the foreground, a playful tubular sculpture interrupts the geometry, a soft curve set against hard-edged verticals.
The façade of Gehry’s tower in full view—11,000 stainless-steel panels folding light into vertical planes. A structure that behaves almost like a living surface, shifting with every change in sky.
The iconic Luma slide: a twisting stainless-steel tube dropping through the building like a single giant stroke of metal. In black and white, its welded seams and curves reveal a sculptural, stripe-like rhythm. And a monochrome view of Luma’s internal framework - box-like steel forms, crisp edges and sharp tonal contrasts. Even in black and white, the building reads as a composition of stacked verticals.
Frank Gehry’s tower was conceived as a kind of sculpted light-catcher - 11,000 folded steel panels and internal structural ribs designed to fracture the Provençal sun into planes, glints and vertical shadows. Even the interior elements echo that logic: the exposed steel armatures, the sharp angles of the walkways and the great twisting slide that drops through the building like a coiled piece of industrial calligraphy. Seen through Harry MC’s lens, these details behave almost like three-dimensional stripes - bands of metal, light and shadow that shift as you move. The architecture becomes a study in repeated verticals and sudden curves, a machine for breaking colour into rhythm. Even the slide, with its rattling welded seams, feels like a stripe drawn at speed: a single, plunging line of steel that reminds the body that architecture can still be playful, unpredictable and full of movement.
Luma’s architecture offers an unusually direct dialogue with Harry MC’s stripe practice. Every surface—steel ribs, glass edges, folded panels, even the curving descent of the slide—breaks light into clear vertical or diagonal sequences. Seen from ground level or from the tower’s upper floors, the site becomes a map of repeated lines and shifting temperatures of colour, a contemporary counterpoint to the warm stone of Arles below. It is this conversation between material, light and geometry that anchors the hard-edged Provence stripe paintings shown on the same page. Explore more stripe work in the World of Stripes project →
From the upper levels of Luma, Arles opens out below: the wide roofs of the former railway workshops, now major contemporary exhibition spaces, set against the geometry of the new cultural campus.