Provence Fieldwork – Stripe Paintings from Colour, Place and Light
Walking, photographing and rebuilding Provence as stripes
Provence has always been a testing ground for colour — stone, sky and shadow shifting by the hour, These notes, photographs and stripe studies are part of an ongoing fieldwork project, built between Bath and the South of France. Everything begins out there, and returns to the studio as measured bands of colour in Harry's World of Stripes.
Inside Saint-Rémy: Corridors, Tiles and Window Light
The Saint-Rémy photographs came out of a longer field trip through Saint-Rémy and Arles – not chasing famous views, but tracking light, architecture and atmosphere as a working stripe painter. Most of the old towns are essentially 18th century; the streets haven’t changed much. The first-floor rooms at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole were a surprise discovery on that trip, part of a wider search for corridors, gardens and backstreets that could be rebuilt later as stripes.
These rooms – a 19th-century pharmacy with original bottles and equipment, nuns' dormitories, an isolation cell, bathrooms and tiled corridors had remained closed to the public for decades while Saint-Paul continued to function as a working psychiatric clinic.
During a recent visit, I was able to photograph this newly accessible floor, making a series of interior studies: corridors receding into doorways, black-and-white tiles marching away underfoot, windows throwing long stripes of light across the walls. Seen through a stripe painter’s eye, the hospital architecture already behaves like an abstract composition, a ready-made grid of bands, shadows and verticals.
Back in Bath, these photographs become working drawings for new stripe paintings. A line of tiles might turn into alternating bands of deep indigo and chalk white; a shaft of warm window light is translated into a thin stripe of ochre or Naples yellow; the cool interior shadow beside it becomes a bruised blue-violet. The compositions stay simple, stacked vertical stripes with emotional temperature straight from Saint-Rémy.
New Saint Remy & Arles stripe paintings by British artist Harry MC
Two of Harry MC's completed canvases from the Provence Fieldwork series are smaller, intimate stripe paintings each built slowly in the studio from Saint-Rémy and Arles notes, drawing from olive groves, hospital stone and the surrounding landscape. They still carry the same vertical stripes of colour, but sit closer to the body, paintings you can live with at home rather than only meet on a gallery wall.
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Saint-Rémy – Olive Stripes
A small square canvas built from the colours that sit low to the ground around Saint-Rémy – earth reds, dense olive greens and dry ochre yellows stacked into uneven vertical stripes. The paint is Harry’s own oil-and-pigment mix, pulled across the surface in a dry-brushed pass so the stripes soften at the edges and earlier layers whisper through. It’s a quiet piece, more field than sky, holding the weight and heat of the olive groves without ever turning back into trees.
Saint-Rémy – Open Landscape
This companion piece lifts its palette a little higher: softer greens, pale yellows, sky blues and thin runs of white light laid over an underlying grid of narrow vertical stripes. The stripes shift in width as they move across the canvas, so the eye walks through the painting rather than just reading it left to right. The same dry-brushed, slightly vintage surface keeps everything gentle and hazed, as if the colours have been sunwashed for a season before they reached the studio.
These are some of the first-floor rooms at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy as Harry found them.
Corridors, confinement cells, baths, pharmacy and dormitories that now sit quietly in the background of the Provence Fieldwork stripe paintings. The photographs below are studio notes from those rooms – fragments some of the stripe paintings borrow from, rather than a step-by-step retelling of Van Gogh’s time here.
In the past Van Gogh's bedroom was the only room available for public access on the first floor. The hydrotherapy room where patients had alternating hot-and-cold baths administered twice weekly - big grey galvanised tubs on heavy feet and flaking white paint, sitting on broken flagstones, a study in structure and muted colour.
Linen and clothing stored in the corridor and the nun's dormitories where they might sleep beside patients to care for them. The nuns who ran the asylum from 1866 onwards were responsible for general services including the pharmacy, laundry, linen room, and kitchen. The red walled visitor's salon, as photographed below by Harry MC, a quieter meeting room recorded as part of the clinic’s everyday architecture. It's also now available for public to appreciate.
You can now also walk the corridors on the first floor following in the footsteps of Van Gogh. The old pharmacy can be viewed together with the grim cell where some patients might have to be confined during difficult periods - bare walls, simple bed, barred window, recorded for its restrained palette and strict geometry.
The classically tiled first floor corridor leading to the offices of Doctor Peyron and Sister Epiphane.
Press, curators and exhibition enquiries
A press set of Saint-Rémy hospital interior photographs (first-floor rooms), together with a selection of Provenve Fieldwork stripe paintings, is available on request for editorial use. For high-resolution images, interview requests or exhibition enquiries relating to the Provence Fieldwork project, please contact the Harry MC studio. All photographs © Harry MC and are available for editorial use by permission.
Saint-Paul de Mausole today
Saint-Paul de Mausole is still a working psychiatric clinic as well as a heritage site. The museum route on the first floor above the cloister runs through some of the old asylum bedrooms, including a reconstruction of Van Gogh’s room and small studio, looking back over the gardens he painted. At the same time, the Maison de Santé Saint-Paul runs an active programme of art-therapy through the Valetudo association, with weekly painting workshops, music and other creative sessions offered as part of psychiatric care on the site. Their stated aim is to “demystify mental illness and put art and culture at the service of care”, allowing patients to be recognised for their artistic work rather than their diagnosis. The Saint-Rémy photographs that feed into the Provence Fieldwork stripe paintings were all taken with that in mind: these are not just historic corridors and tiled floors, but lived spaces where art is still part of how people find structure, rhythm and breathing room during treatment. The Provence Fieldwork paintings are not therapy in themselves, but they do borrow that sense of structure, one band of colour after another, as a way of holding time and experience steady for a moment.
Art studio at the Maison de Santé Saint-Paul which runs an active programme of art-therapy through the Valetudo association,
The backstreets of Arles: stone, shutters and a shard of the future
Most days in Arles start the same way: you slip off the main squares and let the old town close in around you. The streets are narrow enough that you can touch both walls if you stretch, 18th-century facades with crumbling plaster, soft stone blocks and wooden shutters in every shade of blue, green and sun-faded grey. Vines crawl across the walls like loose drawing; downpipes, cables and shadows turn themselves into accidental stripes. If you walk slowly enough, the whole place breaks into bands of colour, honey stone, dark doorway, pale sky, a single strip of terracotta roof cutting across the lot.
It’s tempting to treat Arles as a Roman postcard or a Van Gogh checklist, but the streets are too alive for that. Laundry runs between windows; scooters flash past your knees; someone leans out to water a geranium on a sill the exact yellow you’ve been hunting for. Harry photographs the backs of buildings more than the monuments: scuffed render, patched paint, shutters with four layers of history showing at the edges. Those are the things that end up in the Van Gogh DNA stripes, not the famous café signs, but the way a shadow drops diagonally across a wall, or how three windows in a row accidentally line up as a rhythm.
From some corners you catch a glimpse of Luma Arles in the distance, Frank Gehry’s twisting tower made from 11,000 angled stainless-steel panels, catching the Provençal light like a stack of shattered mirrors. It reflects sky and cloud and the flat industrial roofs around it, a kind of giant, metallic stripe painting dropped onto the edge of town. The old streets and the new tower don’t cancel each other out, they just give you two very different ways of thinking about verticals. Down below it’s shutters, arches and drainpipes, up above it’s crumpled metal and sharp window slots. Somewhere between the two is where the Provence Fieldwork paintings sit, stone, sky and steel reassembled as measured bands of colour.
Luma is a short walk from the old town, where suddenly Arles goes vertical. The low sheds and workshops of the Parc des Ateliers give way to Maja Hoffmann’s cultural campus crowned by Frank Gehry’s twisting tower. Officially it’s an “experimental centre” for art, environment and research; in practice it feels like someone has taken the light and stone of Arles and exploded them into a stack of angled metal. The glazed drum at the base reads like a contemporary echo of the Roman arena, a clear circular band holding the ground while the tower above breaks into thousands of shifting facets. In strong sun the stainless-steel cladding behaves almost like a three-dimensional stripe painting, vertical shards catching different temperatures of light, cool blue here, hot white there, fragments of sky and roofline bouncing back at you. It’s a long way from Van Gogh’s Alpilles, but the logic isn’t so different, the same landscape broken into planes of colour, just rendered now in glass and metal instead of paint. For broader travel notes and gallery visits beyond Provence, see Travels in Colour & Stripes.