La Ribaute - Anselm Kiefer's studio museum, Barjac, France
HARRY MC
Travels in Colour & Stripes
Travels in Colour & Stripes - where the journeys end, each one part of Harry’s research, watching how colour behaves in different conditions, how pattern and movement emerge from architecture, landscape and light. Notes and photographs are the fragments that later settle into the measured calm of the Bath studio. He follows colour more than maps: the way a wall fades in the sun, balconies stacked above a back street, the hum of a gallery floor after closing time. Miami heat, winter light in Copenhagen, the stone glow of Rome or Athens… it all gets filed away and resurfaces as stripes sooner or later, eventually feeding back into the World of Stripes paintings.
Arles: Potatoes, Polke and a Winter’s Tale for Van Gogh
When I dropped into the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles last month, the place felt mid-sentence. Inside, they were still showing Sigmar Polke: Beneath the Cobblestones, the Earth, a sprawling retrospective of paintings, films, photographs and installations that runs from early Pop mischief to late, alchemical surfaces. Outside, the banners were already hinting at what comes next: “À Vincent: un conte d’hiver / To Vincent: A Winter’s Tale”, a new exhibition in which twenty-one artists send their own “letters” back to Van Gogh via the themes in his correspondence.
It’s exactly the kind of programming this foundation does well: a small group of Van Gogh works on loan, and then a big conversation with the present.
The Polke show begins with two small, muddy miracles by Van Gogh: Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes and Basket of Potatoes, both painted in Nuenen in 1885. You step out of the Provençal sun straight into this heavy Dutch soil – bent backs, low sky, a basket of tubers that looks more like a pile of stones than food. It’s hard not to think of The Potato Eaters even if it isn’t on the wall. The potatoes are really a stand-in for labour, hunger, the weight of the ground.
Turn the corner and Polke answers with full absurdity. There’s a wooden hut-like structure bristling with real potatoes stuck onto its frame – Potato House, his sculptural joke about domesticity, labour and the stubborn life of a tuber. Nearby, a contraption whirls a single potato around on a stick, like a farm experiment gone wrong. It’s half sacred, half slapstick. Someone in the British press later wrote that Polke never abandoned the potato motif and by the fourth room they wished he had; but standing there, with the smell of raw potato in the air and Van Gogh’s little Nuenen canvases still in your peripheral vision, the obsession makes sense. The potato becomes a kind of punctuation mark – a dumb, earthy full stop you keep tripping over.
Bertrand Lavier’s fountain Fontaine (2014) – a bundle of multicoloured hosepipes turned into a playful, stripy water sculpture at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.
Polke has always been a multi-material artist – paint, resin, fabric, photography, film, found objects – layered until you’re not sure what you’re looking at any more. The Arles show leans into that: grids of images overprinted with dots, veils of colour over chemical stains, drawings and photo-collages that feel one step away from melting. Critics talk about his “incongruous associations” – history, kitsch, politics and religion mashed together and then half-sabotaged.
For a stripe painter, what sticks is the way he repeats and tests things. That potato house is basically a grid in 3D. The dot screens behave like microscopic stripes. Even the wooden frames and scaffold poles all march in lines. Where I work with long vertical bands of paint, Polke does it with materials and motifs: line something up, mess with it, repeat.
The Fondation is very clear about why he’s in the building at all: this is Van Gogh’s house as much as Polke’s, and the show underlines the way both artists use humble stuff – potatoes, mud colours, cheap fabrics – as a way into bigger questions about history and vision. Those early Nuenen pictures are as important to the story as the later sunflowers; they’re the ground the later colour springs from.
By the time you read this, the Polke retrospective will have closed and the Fondation will be reopening with To Vincent: A Winter’s Tale – twenty-one modern and contemporary artists, from figures like Anselm Kiefer to younger names, each offering a work as a kind of letter back to Van Gogh’s years in Provence. The themes are the ones you’d expect from the letters: light, landscape, friendship, solitude. It feels like the next chapter in the same conversation I walked into: artists of different generations, all asking what it means to work “after Vincent” without simply repeating him.
For me, all of this runs straight into my own Van Gogh DNA project. I don’t have a potato house in the studio, but I do have hospital corridors from Saint-Rémy, Rhône embankments, Arles courtyards and a growing pile of photographs from Van Gogh’s British detours. Where Polke pins real potatoes to a frame, I grind earth pigments and line them up in stripes. Where the Fondation hangs Nuenen labourers beside a forest of tubers, I try to carry some of that weight into vertical bands of colour – land, work and light compressed into a sequence of painted decisions.
The Arles visit ends, as these things often do, back in Bath with a roll of images and a notebook full of small thoughts. Potatoes, Polke, winter letters to Vincent – they all go into the same pile. The Van Gogh DNA canvases that come out the other side won’t show potatoes or little huts, but somewhere in the density of greys and browns, and in the way colour stacks up along the canvas, there’s still a trace of that odd day in the Fondation: spuds on sticks, Dutch fields on loan, and a German artist testing how far he can push materials and metaphor in Van Gogh’s house while the next wave of “letters” is being hung in the galleries next door.
A wooden hut-like structure bristling with real potatoes stuck onto its frame – Potato House by Sigmar Polke.
Standing in front of Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes you feel how far this is from the bright Arles canvases – the whole thing is built from bruised greens and browns, the figures almost swallowed by the field. It’s a painting about work and weight more than romance. For me it’s also a kind of proto-stripe: long bands of earth, sky and clothing stacked across the surface, the same few colours repeating and shifting. Back in the studio those tones creep into the Van Gogh DNA paintings as heavier stripes – potato-field greys, soil browns, dull sky blues, reminders that before the sunflowers and stars there was this: two figures bent over a row of plants, digging colour out of the ground one strip at a time
Bridget Riley at the Musée d’Orsay — Finding the First Spark
Bridget Riley overseeing her exhibition at Museum d'Orsay, Paris.2025.
In the first room you can almost sense Riley thinking her way into colour. Not through theory, but through repetition, adjustment, doubt, and resolve. That’s something I recognise immediately. My own stripes rise or collapse on those same decisions, one colour pushing against another, one edge tightening or relaxing. When you get it right, the painting breathes. When you don’t, the whole thing suffocates.
Riley once said that copying Seurat taught her “pictorial thinking,” and that his methodical approach echoed something she was already searching for. I get that. France does that to you. I’ve spent twenty-five years wandering this country with notebooks and cameras, trying to understand how colour behaves in specific light, Arles at noon, Marseille just before rain, Aix in the late afternoon. Everything changes depending on where you stand.
What I love most is that her copy of Pont de Courbevoie still hangs in her studio. After seventy years, the original spark is still there on the wall, quietly reminding her where the work began. Every artist has something like that, an anchor, a compass, a moment you return to when doubt creeps in.
Walking out of the exhibition, I felt that familiar Parisian shift, the subtle recalibration that happens after seeing someone else wrestle honestly with colour. A few rooms of Riley can do that. They clear the head, they sharpen the eye and remind you that the smallest decisions are the ones that matter. However Paris wasn’t finished with me yet. Across the river, the Bourse de Commerce was opening its big Minimal exhibition — Flavin, Martin, Ryman, Morellet, Ufan, a very different kind of clarity, a different kind of light, so I crossed the bridge and kept walking.
Paris always resets my eye. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the winter light, that cool chalky wash that makes colours behave differently or maybe it’s the geometry of the city, the way lines and shadows feel more deliberate here. Whatever it is, I always arrive with the sense that something is about to shift and this time it was Bridget Riley at the Musée d’Orsay with the exhibition 'Point de départ' or “starting point.” A deceptively simple title for what turns out to be a quietly revealing showing.
The whole display circles around a single moment in 1959, long before the diagonals and pulses she’s famous for. Riley sits down with a printed reproduction of Seurat’s Pont de Courbevoie and makes a copy. She hasn’t seen the original yet; she isn’t interested in the narrative of bathers and industry. She wants to understand how a painting vibrates, how two colours placed beside each other can produce light.
It’s the kind of moment every painter has at some point: the private, stubborn decision to solve something on your own terms. The Orsay has installed the exhibition on the fifth floor, in the post-Impressionist galleries, with the Seine drifting in and out of the windows. It’s a perfect gesture, Seurat hovering in the background, literally and metaphorically. A few English pieces hinted at this framing: Le Monde spoke about Riley’s slow movement from figuration towards abstraction, Paris Update described the exhibition as a dialogue between mentor and mentee, and the Financial Times reminded readers that Riley never really left Seurat behind. All true, but you only feel the full story when you’re standing in front of the work.
Bridget Riley Red and Blue to Red and Turquoise 1967.
Bridget Riley, Cornflower, 1982
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Harry MC Oil & pigment on canvas Untitled 2025
Leaving the Musée d’Orsay, I felt that familiar Parisian shift — the sense that colour had quietly rearranged itself behind my eyes. Riley’s rooms had sharpened everything. And across the river, another exhibition was waiting: Minimal, at the Bourse de Commerce. A different kind of clarity, a different way of seeing. I crossed the bridge and kept walking.
MINIMAL at the Bourse de Commerce — A Different Kind of Clarity
After leaving the Musée d’Orsay, I crossed the Seine with that familiar post-exhibition buzz, the feeling that colour has rearranged itself slightly behind the eyes. Paris will do that, one good show sharpens you, two can tilt the whole day. And the Bourse de Commerce was waiting with something very different a major new exhibition titled Minimal, a major survey of Minimal art drawn from the Pinault Collection and several other heavy-hitting lenders.
Walking into the Bourse always feels a bit like entering a planetarium of contemporary art, the domed ceiling, the wide arc of the central space, the strange acoustics. For Minimalism, it was a perfect setting, with the clarity of the architecture meeting the clarity of the work so the building itself feels like part of the curation. Once inside the exhibition opens with a kind of quiet assertion, you could say less isn’t absence it's concentration.
Works by Lee Ufan, each built from deliberate gestures with charged space around it. The stillness and precision echo the restraint I look for in my Harry MC minimal stripe paintings, especially the wide, single-tone stripes pulled with a dry brush to leave that soft, weathered edge.
Dan Flavin’s tubes hum with that thin, electric light he used like a sculptural material. Agnes Martin’s grids are soft and unwavering at the same time, as if the air itself has been combed. Robert Ryman’s whites sit in that place between painting and object, where texture becomes the subject. François Morellet shows up with his mathematical humour, all lines, angles, sequences held tightly in place. A few steps on, a Lee Ufan work appeared, understated, precise, and quietly decisive. And On Kawara’s date paintings whisper from the walls like time itself keeping its own record. Minimalism isn’t cold, it’s exact.
As I walked through, I felt that familiar shift in tempo, the slowing down that Minimal work demands. You start noticing the distance between objects, the thickness of edges, the way light catches a surface at a shallow angle. It’s less like looking at art and more like tuning your own perception, millimetre by millimetre.
For someone who paints stripes, this kind of clarity is oddly nourishing. People sometimes think maximal colour comes from maximal action as if exuberance is the engine. But the truth is that the strongest colour decisions come from discipline, from paring everything back until the painting has no choice but to hold itself together. Minimalism understands that instinct, it strips away the noise so the structure can breathe. There was a moment in the Flavin room, a green and pink intersection glowing in the corner where I felt the whole exhibition click. Light behaving as form, form behaving as thought. It reminded me of what I’ve always loved about travelling and looking at art and the way different traditions of art sharpen different parts of your brain.
Riley had reminded me of vibration, the pulse that happens when one colour leans into another.
Minimalism reminded me of the opposite, the interval and the breath between marks. That breath is exactly what brought my mind back to Lee Ufan.
Ufan’s work sits somewhere between painting and philosophy, a mark placed so intentionally that it alters the entire room. I first encountered his pieces in Paris years ago, but it was in Arles, standing inside his private house-gallery on a blisteringly bright afternoon, that I understood how powerful a single placement could be. Seeing Minimal in the Bourse felt like the perfect preparation, a clearing of the ground before stepping back into Ufan’s world of stone, brushstroke, silence and space. And that’s where my trip was headed next, Arles. Back to Ufan and back to the south where colour behaves differently and the heat changes everything you think you know about edges and intervals.
Lee Ufan in Arles — Where Quiet Becomes a Force
After Paris I took the long drive south, that familiar arc across France where the light gradually loosens, the colours warm up, and everything feels a little more elemental. Arles always does something to me, Riley may sharpen the eye, Minimalism slows the pulse, but Arles, oh yes, Arles resets the whole system. My visit this time was for research on the book I’ve been sketching out for a few years now a, slow, wandering project about colour, landscape, and the art spaces that quietly shape you. Through that work, I’d arranged access to Lee Ufan’s space in Arles, and it was the first time I’d returned since the team there opened the doors of the 17th-century Hôtel Vernon and transformed it into something that feels part museum, part meditation, part thought experiment.
I stepped inside and everything changed tempo immediately. Ufan’s work always does that, recalibrates the room. It wasn’t a grand arrival, no marble hall, no dramatic reveal, just stone, light, and a kind of poised silence that makes you instantly aware of your own breathing. The lovely staff left me free to wander, which is exactly the way Ufan should be seen, without prompts, without commentary, without interruption. After climbing the grand winding staircase, in the first room, a single brushstroke floated on a pale field, not decorative, not expressive, just placed. You could feel the intention behind it. Mono-ha at its purest, the relationship between the gesture, the surface, and the surrounding space. The mark is only half the work; the other half is the air around it. I’ve always been drawn to that idea.
Some of my own stripe paintings lean toward that kind of minimalism, wide, single-colour bands pulled with a dry brush, leaving a soft, vintage edge where the pigment thins. People think stripes are all rhythm and colour, but often it’s the interval between tones that carries the emotion. Ufan made me see those intervals differently: not as gaps, but as charged spaces. I took my photographs carefully, not as documentation but as reminders, subtle shadows, fragments of stone, the way a window reframes a work, the cool resonance of Tadao Ando’s architectural language woven through the old mansion. I think Arles suits Ufan, the light is honest here, it doesn’t flatter it reveals. A brushstroke reads differently at three in the afternoon than it does at ten in the morning, and the building allows that to happen rather than fighting it.
What I love most about Ufan’s presence in this setting is the sense of dialogue. Not with history or landscape, but with the viewer’s own attention. You stand long enough and the room adjusts around you, not physically, but perceptually. The work teaches you to slow your looking and that’s rare.
Walking back into the heat afterwards, the dry, metallic brightness Arles seems to specialise in, I felt the whole trip beginning to align. Riley in Paris had set the vibration; the Minimal show had cleared the ground. Ufan provided the hinge, the breath, the quiet force. And as I crossed the square, I caught myself thinking about my own studio in Bath, those long canvases waiting for their next decisions. The broad stripes, the dry-brushed surfaces, the weathered edges that hold the day’s light, all of it shaped, in some way, by the places where colour is allowed to breathe.
In the very heart of Arles, the Hôtel Vernon, a private mansion built between the 16th and 18th centuries, adjacent to the Arenas and the Place du Forum, over 14,000 sq.ft on three floors display the works of Lee Ufan, painter and minimalist sculptor, as well as a bookshop, an art store, mediation and reception areas.
This visit to the Ufan space was from a later trip to Arles, when the focus was on intervals, silence and structure. The journey below steps back to an earlier time where I walked Van Gogh’s old paths, mapping the places he painted, collecting the first hints of colour that might one day find their way into my striped works.
Anselm Kiefer’s La Ribaute
Concrete, Memory and a Quiet Stripe Obsession
I’d been looking at photographs of Anselm Kiefer’s La Ribaute for years before I finally set foot there. You think you’re prepared – concrete towers, tunnels, glasshouses full of lead books – and then you walk through the gates at Barjac and realise the photos barely touch the sides.
La Ribaute isn’t a “sculpture park” in any normal sense. It’s a 40-hectare studio-estate just north of Barjac in the south of France, threaded with paths, underground passages, pavilions, ponds and hulking concrete structures that feel somewhere between ruined industry and half-built myth. A guided tour starts from a modest central courtyard and then disappears into this landscape of towers, tunnels and chambers. You’re not just looking at work; you’re walking through someone’s thought process in three dimensions.
For a stripe painter, it’s impossible not to see the place in bands. The reinforced concrete monoliths – poured inside shipping containers so they dry with ribbed sides – read like vertical stripes turned into architecture. Steel rebar, laddered staircases, stacked slabs: everywhere there are lines, repeats, grids and rhythms. Kiefer’s language is different to mine, but the basic instinct feels familiar – take a structure, repeat it, let time and weather do the rest.
One story from the tour stayed with me. We were told that one of the huge concrete blocks had collapsed during construction, leaving a tangled pile of steel and rubble. Rather than hide the accident, Kiefer built a new structure around the fallen sculpture and kept it as a work in its own right. That felt very Kiefer: history as something you don’t tidy away, but frame and live with.
The site has its own odd practicalities. There’s a new car park off the Barjac–Vallon Pont d’Arc road, a security gate, a short walk up to the main yard where the tours begin. No café, no gift shop – just a polite suggestion to bring water and sensible shoes. It’s all very un-museumlike, which suits the work. You feel more like you’ve been allowed into a functioning industrial plant of memory than a curated attraction.
Kiefer has always been a materials artist – lead, straw, ash, sunflowers, books cast in metal – and at La Ribaute that fascination expands to landscape scale. Concrete isn’t just a building material here; it’s a way of writing in the land. Knowing that reinforced concrete was invented just up the road in Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie adds a local twist: you’re standing in a place where both the material and the mythology are home-grown.
There’s another quiet thread running through all this, and it loops back to Van Gogh. Kiefer has spoken often about discovering Van Gogh as a child and feeling that intensity of colour and sky, and this year the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has been showing his works in dialogue with Van Gogh’s paintings. He’s also part of the new exhibition in Arles that invites contemporary artists to “write back” to Vincent.
My own Van Gogh moment was earlier and simpler: a school trip in the late 1960s to La Grande Motte, with a detour to Arles to meet Van Gogh on the gallery wall. Decades later I find myself walking Kiefer’s concrete fields at Barjac, then heading on to Saint-Rémy and Arles again to work on my Van Gogh DNA stripe paintings. Different artists, different materials, same long shadow.
Back in the Bath studio, the Barjac visit doesn’t turn into literal Kiefer pastiches – no lead books or collapsing towers – but some of the structures sneak in sideways. A run of verticals from a concrete rib here, a staircase grid there, the way a grey can feel simultaneously industrial and tender. Stripes are a quieter language than Kiefer’s scorched earth, but they can still carry that sense of weight and weather.
La Ribaute feels like a reminder that an artist’s world can be bigger than the canvas: acres of ground, tunnels in the hillside, collaborations with other artists threaded through the site. My world is smaller – two studios, Bath and Provence, and a lot of long canvases – but the question is the same: how much history, place and memory can you pack into a single repeating structure? In Kiefer’s case, the answer is measured in tons of concrete. In mine, it’s one vertical band of colour at a time.
Back in the Bath studio, some of that Barjac weight creeps quietly into the stripes: concrete greys get heavier, rust colours sneak into the bands, and the canvases feel a shade more industrial. Kiefer builds whole landscapes out of lines and blocks; I keep mine on canvas, one vertical stripe at a time – but the question is the same: how much history can you pack into a repeating structure?
Dungeness: Rust, Reactors and a Shingle Edge
Walking Derek Jarman’s beach, thinking in stripes
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There are bits of Dungeness that feel like the world is still booting up. You come off the last sensible road and suddenly it’s just shingle in every direction – flat, wind-flayed, almost treeless – with the nuclear power station squatting on the horizon and a scatter of houses that look as if they’ve washed up there by accident. Some of them literally did: old railway carriages turned into chalets, patched and extended, sitting on timber blocks in the middle of the stones. It’s hard not to imagine what this place felt like in the 1950s, before the reactors arrived – just shingle, huts and the sea – but the power station gives it a kind of menacing backdrop that’s become part of the atmosphere rather than a mistake.
What keeps pulling me back is the way the place reads in bands and uprights. You get that big, stubborn horizontal: sea, shingle, sky – three wide stripes that barely move all day. Then someone’s hammered a jetty into it, or left a boat hauled up, or strung telephone wires across the view. Telegraph poles march into the distance, masts poke up out of beached fishing boats, warning signs and fences slice the landscape into verticals. If you half-close your eyes, Dungeness arranges itself into a painting: horizon band, shingle band, concrete band, then a staccato rhythm of poles, pipes and chimneys.
The power station is the obvious monster in the scene – all blunt concrete and gridded facades – but it’s not just dead weight. Stand close and you start to see it as a kind of brutalist colour-field: slab greys, dirty creams, safety yellow railings, railings and stairs cross-hatching the walls. It was meant to be pure function; now it’s a half-retired monument, edging into decommissioning, humming away while people argue about what comes next. Part of me thinks they should just turn the whole thing into an art museum and leave the pipework as the main exhibit.
Then you swing round and there’s Prospect Cottage – Derek Jarman’s tar-black hut with its yellow window frames and that impossible garden stitched straight into the shingle. No fence, no cosy lawn, just driftwood uprights, flint circles, rusted iron and sea kale all sitting under the gaze of the reactor. Jarman was building his own kind of linear abstraction out there: vertical posts, radiating paths, plant spines catching the wind. It’s a reminder that you can make something precise and poetic in the most exposed, awkward spot if you keep your nerve.
Dungeness is officially a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with rare plants, birds and insect life clinging on in this harsh mix of shingle, marsh and lagoon. That designation keeps the worst development at bay and means the place doesn’t tidy itself up for visitors. It stays raw: old winches rusting into the stones, lines of fish crates bleaching in the sun, bits of railway track from the miniature line ending nowhere at all. The longer you stay, the more you notice small colour collisions – a door painted a particular blue against tarred boards, a string of orange floats, a patch of scrubby green catching evening light.
The paintings that come out of Dungeness don’t show cottages or reactors head-on. What I bring home are little pieces of the place: a stripe of warning yellow from a handrail, the mute grey of shingle under cloud, a rust red from a winch, the inky black of a hut, the hard white of a lighthouse stripe. Back in the Bath studio those turn into vertical bands – narrow, stacked, slightly abrasive – a kind of weather report in paint. Somewhere between the power-station slab and Jarman’s garden circles, Dungeness turns into stripes: wildness compressed into a geometry you can hang on a wall.
Derek Jarman feels like a quiet ancestor to what I’m doing, even though our work looks completely different. At Prospect Cottage he turned this patch of shingle into a kind of open-air drawing – black timber, yellow window frames, driftwood uprights, flint circles, rusted iron, all laid out with the precision of a painter who thinks in structure as much as image. It’s not stripes, but it’s the same instinct: take a harsh, marginal place and organise it into lines, bands, clusters of colour you can live with. Walking around his garden you’re constantly reading verticals and horizontals – posts, paths, plant stems, horizon – in a way that feeds straight back into my own stripe paintings. He proved you can build a whole language out here with almost nothing; I just happen to do it with long bands of paint instead of sea kale and iron.
Field notes: Hauser & Wirth Somerset - art, architecture and landscape all nudged into the same conversation
Durslade Farm is one of those places that feels familiar and strange at the same time, a Somerset farm stitched back together as a rural art campus. The barns and cowsheds have been folded into galleries, studios, a bar and a farm shop; art, architecture and landscape all nudged into the same conversation. Hauser & Wirth have spent the last decade turning this edge of Bruton site into a place for artists and community, exhibitions, education, gardens, food and more than a million people have wandered through since it opened
I arrived on one of those clear, bright West Country days with a camera and not much of a plan beyond “see what the stripes notice.” The current show, Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely: Myths & Machines, is a full takeover of the space, the first UK exhibition devoted to both artists together, spread across galleries and outdoor spaces.
Inside, the rooms hum. Tinguely’s kinetic machines shake, rattle and whirr, spidery constructions that look as if they might fall apart and yet keep moving, like drawings that have climbed off the page and learned to clank. Nearby, Niki de Saint Phalle’s world is all curves and colour, exuberant forms, the famous shooting paintings where she literally fired at reliefs loaded with bags of paint, and those joyful “Nana” figures that dance out on the lawn.
Seen together, the show is really about energy and risk, machines that might fly apart, colour that might spill over. I kept thinking about how their work treats movement as a central material, the turning of cogs, the recoil of a shot, the sway of a sculpture in the wind. In my own work the movement is slower and more contained – colour in bands, eye-travel instead of noise, but it’s chasing the same question, how you record time and feeling in a structure that doesn’t quite sit still.
Later, the route bends you towards the bar. Roth Bar lives in one of the old farm buildings and feels like a sculpture that happens to serve drinks, layers of reclaimed timber, signs, painted panels, light boxes and objects, originally conceived with Dieter Roth’s family and evolving over time, it’s as if someone’s taken a lifetimes contents of their garage and stuck it all together, it’s fabulous. From a distance it reads as a stack of horizontal bands and vertical interruptions, up close it’s all mismatched textures and stories. Roth himself was no stranger to stripes and grids, works like Organic figure with horizontal and vertical stripes run bands of colour through a form until the figure almost dissolves into pattern. Standing at the bar with a coffee, you’re effectively inside a very irregular stripe painting, salvaged colour arranged around the practical business of ordering a drink.
Only when you step out of the back door does the garden open up properly. Piet Oudolf’s meadow sits beyond the buildings like a soft, shifting carpet, a 1.5-acre field of perennials and grasses that changes character with the seasons. In autumn it’s more bone and memory than bloom, bands of seed heads, stems and different heights that your eye reads in long horizontal swathes. It’s not stripes in the hard-edged sense, but the logic is similar, repetition with variation, colour and structure drifting into and out of alignment as you walk.
Hauser & Wirth Somerset isn’t an exotic flight away from Bath, it’s just down the road. But as far as Travels in Colour & Stripes goes, it earns its place: a reminder that sometimes the strongest jolts to the stripes come from the nearest fields. Back in the studio the field notes sit on the same wall as my current stripe canvases, part of the same ongoing World of Stripes project.
Arles: Walking with Van Gogh, Chasing the Light, Thinking in Stripes
On a recent Provence trip, Harry dropped into Arles to walk some of Van Gogh’s night-time territory and scout ideas for future Van Gogh DNA stripes. The café on the Place du Forum – rebuilt and painted to echo Café Terrace at Night (1888) – is pure tourist theatre, but also a ready-made stripe lesson: yellow awning, dark windows, stone facades and deep blue sky stacked like bands of colour. Harry’s photographs from the square treat it less as a shrine and more as raw material – awnings, shadows and paving stones breaking naturally into vertical and horizontal strips.
For years the recreated Café Van Gogh / Café la Nuit pulled in crowds every day. Fellow traders called it “a bit of a rip-off”, but it was extremely well staged and, from a painter’s point of view, surprisingly faithful to the mood of the picture. It’s now closed after a run-in with the tax authorities, the terrace shuttered and the famous yellow awning rolled away – which makes Harry’s earlier photographs feel like small time capsules of the café’s brief second life as a living Van Gogh set. Let's hope it reopens soon.
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Van Gogh had intended to paint a night scene for some time, but not in the usual shades of black and grey. He painted the gas-lit terrace of a cafe in Place du Forum at night, in order to capture the true colours of this nocturnal street scene. He was pleased with the result “I believe that an abundance of gaslight, which, after all, is yellow and orange, intensifies blue.” Later, astronomical research showed he painted the constellations precisely as they appeared on the night of 16th or 17th September 1888.
Café Terrace at Night (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh.
Another site in Arles for Van Gogh fans is the Langlois Bridge. While the bridge today is a reconstruction, relocated from its original position, it remains a symbolic site and Harry MC joined other Van Gogh enthusiasts taking a look. It's about a 30-minute walk south of the Archaeology Museum in Arles. Though the walk itself might not be particularly scenic, and the bridge arguably looks more striking in Van Gogh’s paintings, it’s worth the trip if you’re on a Van Gogh pilgrimage or like Harry, scoping out for a future project. Harry certainly found it rewarding to see this iconic spot in person.Van Gogh created several versions of the Langlois Bridge, the most famous being the one housed in the Kröller-Müller Museum, which depicts women washing clothes in the canal. Another notable version, held at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, shows a lady with an umbrella following a horse and cart across the bridge. This charming piece combines technical precision and artistic flair, reflecting the style of bridge that reminded Van Gogh of his Dutch homeland. From his letters to his brother Theo, we know that Van Gogh used a perspective frame to assist in constructing these works.
Van Gogh's painting and Langlois Bridge as it looks today.
Vincent van Gogh in Arles including, of course, the fateful day of the "ear incident".
Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, seeking to escape the pressures of Paris and improve his health. He was drawn to the bright light and vivid natural colors of Provence. Initially, his plan was to stay in Arles temporarily “to get his bearings” before moving on to Marseille, according to his brother Theo. However, Van Gogh found Arles so inspiring that he decided to settle there and dedicated himself to his art with remarkable energy.
His time in Arles became one of the most productive periods of his career, during which he created over 300 paintings and drawings. Far from painting solely for pleasure or vocation, Van Gogh was focused on making a living from his art. He regularly wrote to Theo, requesting large quantities of paint and canvas from Paris, always emphasising the importance of securing a good discount. Van Gogh strategically painted subjects he believed would appeal to buyers, including almond blossoms, sunflowers, and portraits of local characters. He often created multiple versions of the same subject, calling them “absolutely equivalent and identical repetitions.” His work was frequently executed at extraordinary speed. he once described completing a piece as being “knocked off in one hour.”
During his stay in Arles, Van Gogh envisioned establishing an artist’s collective. He proposed that the group’s work could be sold by Theo in Paris, with the artists benefiting from shared resources and a stronger negotiating position with dealers. With this goal in mind, he rented rooms in the "Yellow House" on the corner of Place Lamartine and set up a studio. He also worked tirelessly to persuade Paul Gauguin, whose work he greatly admired, to join him in Arles. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin, “Even while working, I never cease to think about this enterprise of setting up a studio with yourself and me as permanent residents.”
Gauguin eventually arrived in October 1888. Theo expressed his hope for their collaboration in a letter to Vincent, saying, “So Gauguin’s coming; that will make a big change in your life. I hope that your efforts will succeed in making your house a place where artists will feel at home.” At first, the partnership proved fruitful, with both artists producing exceptional work. However, their approaches to art were fundamentally different: Gauguin painted from memory and imagination, while Van Gogh preferred to paint directly from life. These differences, coupled with their contrasting personalities, led to increasing tension. Their discussions about art, including the works of Delacroix and Rembrandt, were often intense and “excessively electric.” Van Gogh likened their debates to an overworked battery, leaving them mentally drained.
The situation reached a breaking point on December 23, 1888. After a heated argument, Van Gogh became severely agitated and reportedly threatened Gauguin with a razor. This led Gauguin to consider returning to Paris, an event that may have precipitated Van Gogh’s infamous mental breakdown. That evening, Van Gogh cut off his left ear, wrapped it in paper, and gave it to a local prostitute, who fainted upon receiving it. The next day, the police intervened, and Van Gogh was admitted to the hospital for treatment. Following this incident, his doctor recommended that he be sent to a special asylum. The dramatic episode became the talk of Arles, especially after a report on the “ear incident” appeared in the local newspaper, Forum Républicain, the following Sunday.
So, there you have it, Van Gogh and Harry MC have a lot in common. They both found Arles to be inspiring, both have created multiple versions of the same subject and both can execute work at extraordinary speed, although Harry says "knocking something off in an hour " is not something he'd like to contemplate, likewise an "ear incident".
Paul Gauguin painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers – though it was mid-winter and there wasn’t a sunflower in sight. It’s a reminder that artists often paint what they remember, not what they see, something that runs through Harry MC’s own stripe paintings, where colour and rhythm become a kind of recollection in motion
Harry MC finds somewhere in Arles for quiet contemplation - Les Alyscamps
Les Alyscamps is a former Roman necropolis, renowned as one of the ancient world’s most significant burial sites. Following Roman tradition, burials took place outside the city walls, often along the roads leading into a city, which were lined with elaborate memorials. The Alyscamps was consecrated in the 3rd century by Saint Trophime, the first bishop of Arles, as a Christian burial ground. Its prestige as a final resting place led to overcrowding, with sarcophagi stacked up to three layers deep and coffins brought in from across Europe.
The cemetery remained in use through the medieval period but gradually fell out of favor. By the Renaissance, its decline was so marked that it became a source of stone and sarcophagi, with city officials even gifting these burial monuments to distinguished visitors. Further damage occurred in the 19th century due to the construction of a railway and canal. Despite this, Les Alyscamps survived and is now a protected monument. Today, it is a tranquil and atmospheric site to explore, offering visitors a glimpse into history and the opportunity to view the unfinished 11th-century St-Honorat chapel.
In October 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin selected Les Alyscamps as the first location for their painting expeditions in Arles, working side by side to capture its unique character. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris describes the 19th-century site as being dominated by avenues of cypresses and a scattering of empty sarcophagi, lending it a melancholic air.
Gauguin’s interpretation of Les Alyscamps diverged from its historical significance. His painting focuses instead on the serene landscape, featuring the Romanesque church of St-Honorat in the background, fields, woods, and a canal where three figures, a man and two women dressed as Arlésiennes, are strolling. Interestingly, Gauguin, who did not find Arlésiennes particularly attractive, gave the piece the ironic title Landscape or Three Graces with the Temple of Venus when sending it to Theo Van Gogh, Vincent’s brother and art dealer.
Gauguin’s work, characteristic of his Synthetism, excludes historical references and instead employs juxtaposed masses, hatching, and highly saturated hues for a subjective and decorative interpretation of the landscape. His serene composition contrasts sharply with Van Gogh’s contemporary works of the same location, which convey a more tormented vision of Les Alyscamps. Some of the colour notes and photographs from these walks in Arles and Saint-Rémy feed directly into Harry’s studio stripes. A more focused look at that side of the work appears on the Provence Fieldwork page.
Harry MC was on location in Barcelona so, of course, dropped by Foundation Miró
"I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music".- Joan Miró
Joan Miró: Shaped by Landscapes, Defined by Rebellion
Born in Barcelona in 1893, Joan Miró was profoundly shaped by the landscapes and cultures of Mont-roig, Paris, Majorca, New York, and Japan. The rural town of Mont-roig in Catalonia provided a grounding contrast to the intellectual energy of 1920s Paris, where he engaged with surrealist poets. In the 1940s, exposure to abstract expressionism in New York further expanded his artistic vision. During the turmoil of World War II, Miró returned from exile in France to settle in Palma, Majorca, where his friend, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, designed a fabulous studio that would become his sanctuary and creative hub.
Miró’s deep connection to Mont-roig and later Majorca was fundamental to his artistic development. His fascination with the land, everyday objects, and the natural world fueled his experimental approach, driving him beyond academic conventions in pursuit of a 'universal artistic language'. Rejecting rigid classifications, he remained independent of any single movement, forging a distinctive, symbolic style rich in spontaneity and imagination.
Though reserved in his manner, Miró expressed his rebellious spirit and acute sensitivity to political and social upheaval through his work. These opposing forces, his introspective nature and his bold artistic defiance gave rise to a uniquely personal visual language that remains one of the most influential and enduring in 20th century art.
Prades, The Village by Joan Miró 1917, oil on canvas.
Joan Miró’s Prades, The Village is thematically linked to his earlier Fauvist style rural scenes and serves as a precursor to his surrealist vision. This connection is evident in The Tilled Field (1923), where Miró blends human, animal, and vegetal forms into a dreamlike landscape, reflecting his deep connection to nature and Catalonia. His influences range from Romanesque frescoes and medieval tapestries to prehistoric cave paintings and Catalan ceramics. The painting also carries political symbolism, with flags representing Catalonia’s struggle against Spanish repression under Primo de Rivera, signaling Miró’s support for Catalan identity. And nice stripes!
You can visit Miro's studio in Majorca as the artist bequeathed it to the public. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert, a prestigious architect and friend of Miró’s, representative of the modern architectural movement and Dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design at the time. Sert had been disqualified from working as an architect in Spain for 20 years, and so the studio marked a turning point in his career. Through numerous plans and sketches, Sert had designed a life-size studio where tradition was combined with innovation. The concrete structure contrasts with more traditional Mediterranean materials, like stone or clay. The L-shaped studio is on two levels, with a vaulted roof.
In Barcelona Harry MC also visited Museum Tàpies which was created in 1984 by the artist Antoni Tàpies to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. It opened in the former Editorial Montaner y Simón publishing house, a building that was the 1881 work of the modernist architect Luís Domènech i Montaner and the first in the Eixample district to integrate industrial typology and technology, combining exposed brick and iron into the fabric of the city centre.
The Museum Tàpies’ building is “hemmed in” between the two side walls of taller adjacent buildings. To elevate its height and underscore its new identity, Antoni Tàpies created the sculpture crowning the building entitled Cloud and Chair, 1990.
The museum takes a ‘plural, interdisciplinary approach’ and aims to set up cooperative ventures with experts in different fields of learning to contribute to a better understanding of contemporary art and culture. The museum owns one of the most complete collections of Tàpies’ work, mostly made up of donations by Antoni and Teresa Tàpies.
A night time view over Place Catalunya in the centre a Barcelona. No trip to the city would be complete with a trip to the roof of Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, a church devoted to the Holy Family. One of Antoni Gaudi’s most famous works, the church is perhaps best known for still being under construction since 1882, with works funded purely by donations. Take a lift to the top of the towers for a panoramic view of the city and marvel at the ornate architecture. The nativity facade and crypt have also been awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status.
Out of this world: Harry MC visits Damien Hirst's gallery, and beyond.
A visit to Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery turned out to be one of those days that feeds the imagination. The show, a collaboration with two of the most significant street artists to emerge from the street art movement, Shepard Fairey and Invader, was full of rhythm, colour and structure. For Harry MC, it was less about looking and more about listening: how stripes, grids and light can start talking to each other.
I jumped a taxi across the river to Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, a place that feels part spaceship, part cathedral. The brick façade hides vast white halls that stretch upward like launch bays for ideas. Inside, the latest show 'Triple Trouble' brings together Hirst with street-art heavyweights Shepard Fairey and Invader. It’s the kind of collaboration that sounds improbable until you see it, then somehow it all makes sense: three artists orbiting different worlds, occasionally colliding in flashes of colour and noise.
Hirst apparently has work on Mars now, which seems fitting. His art has always felt slightly extraterrestrial, formaldehyde meets futurism. One of the others, I’m told, has a piece somewhere in space, which makes my own studio in Bath feel almost quaint by comparison. But walking through the show, I realised how much of it still connects back to Earth: the geometry, the rhythm, the repetition, all the same language I work with, just told through different materials.
Fairey’s red-and-black walls pulse like visual propaganda from another planet. Invader’s pixel mosaics catch the light like coded transmissions. And Hirst’s immaculate presentation. the surgical lighting, the grids of dots, the floating calm, ties it all together. You could almost believe the whole show was a message beamed in from a parallel art dimension.
As I wandered through, camera in hand, I started noticing how much this cosmic talk still comes down to light. Whether it’s a sunbeam cutting across the polished concrete floor or the glow from a back-lit piece, everything is about how light defines space. That’s what I’m chasing in my own striped paintings, not just colour for its own sake, but the intervals between colours, like the distance between planets. Every stripe is a small orbit, each gap a pause before the next revolution.
The building itself has that engineered precision that makes you want to measure it. Designed by Caruso St John, it’s all clean geometry, long perspectives, floating staircases, skylights that feel like portals. I took a few wide-angle shots inside and out. Even the shadow lines along the walls looked like potential compositions. Back in Bath, I’ll probably turn some of them into studies, stripes mapped to those light intervals, colour fields that echo the mood of the place.
What struck me most, though, was the energy. There’s mischief in the air: Fairey’s rebellion, Invader’s wit, Hirst’s bravado. It’s serious art with a grin. And somehow, standing there, surrounded by dots, pixels and stripes, I felt perfectly at home, part of the same constellation. When I left and looked up at the south London sky, pale, clouded, electric, it did feel a little otherworldly. Maybe we’re all trying to build our own version of space, one line, one colour, one wall at a time.
“I went to see Damien Hirst and somehow ended up thinking about the universe in stripes.”
Harry MC Tours the World’s Barcode Buildings
“I’ve seen stripes in many places, but few as literal as these. Barcode buildings - architecture scanning the skyline like giant artworks.”
Barcode Halls, Shanghai, China. Photo courtesy GMP archetects.
I’ve always said stripes behave differently depending on where you stand. In the Bath studio they’re quiet, almost measured, shifting with whatever the morning stone decides to do. But out in the world they take on a life of their own, stretched across towers, slotted into façades, or wrapped around whole neighbourhoods like a designer got carried away with an enormous barcode scanner. So this is a small tour of the places where architecture starts behaving like painting, rhythms stacked in glass, light trapped between fins, and city blocks that read like giant product labels.
From the air, the Recall facility looks like a crisp monochrome painting laid across the Sydney suburbs — stripes doing what stripes always do: organising the chaos, Photo courtesy Lacoste+Stevenson Architects.
The architects took the humble barcode and stretched it across an entire building, long black-and-white stripes folded over the walls and roof like a graphic skin. What could have been a vast, anonymous shed on the outskirts of Sydney becomes something bolder, a warehouse that reads as a single, oversized pattern in the landscape. The scale is enormous, twice the size of the neighbouring buildings, yet the stripes somehow calm it down, breaking the mass into rhythm and repetition. It’s a perfect example of how a simple linear idea can give a building both identity and direction. Officially, it’s a storage facility for Recall, holding something like six million A3 archive boxes. Unofficially, it’s one of the most unapologetic stripe buildings I’ve seen, a piece of industrial architecture behaving like a giant monochrome painting.
The Middelburg Barcode Building — vertical glass slits and numbered bands giving a modern structure the rhythm of an architectural barcode
After China’s sweeping white bands and Australia’s bold warehouse stripes, I thought I’d already seen the extremes of barcode architecture. But the Dutch have a different take on the idea — quieter, cleaner, almost mathematical.”
“In Middelburg I found something that looked as if a scanner had swept across the skyline. A crisp white block, sliced with slim vertical strips of tinted glass and marked with rows of six-digit numbers beneath the windows, sitting there like a giant barcode in the soft Zeeland light. Designed by Hercuton, the building takes a large, modern volume and breaks it into rhythm — turning mass into pattern, repetition and identity. It’s the kind of architecture that behaves like a painting: simple ingredients, strong contrasts, and a façade that registers the passing light as if it were data
Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean (1915). Zeeland reduced to rhythm and line.
Zeeland always reminds me of Mondrian’s ‘Pier and Ocean’ — the moment he took the North Sea and reduced it to pure rhythm, a scattering of verticals and horizontals that still feels like the DNA of modern abstraction. The Middelburg barcode building sits in that same lineage: a real-world attempt to fold light, order and repetition into a façade. It’s geometry by way of the Dutch coast — stripes before they even know they’re stripes.
By the time you reach St Petersburg you'd have seen stripes across continents, white bands, black slats, bold wraps. But nothing prepares you for the red-banded behemoth by the Neva, scanning the skyline in a very Russian rhythm. In a city of greys and pale stone façades, one bright red block stands out like an exclamation mark. Designed by Vitruvius & Sons and completed around 2007, the building officially named 'Shtrikh Kod', translated literally as Barcode, turns functional scale into a graphic statement. Four floors of retail and office space by the Volodarsky Bridge are clad with vertical red fins and dark slits, the effect: you walk up and there it is, a giant architectural barcode against the Soviet-era apartment blocks. The numbers stamped above the bands only increase the sensation that this structure is not just built, but coded. For me it resonated deeply: stripe theory meets urban brutalism, and the light of St Petersburg falls across it differently than everywhere else I’ve been.
Barcode Building, St Petersburg — bright red façade of the Shtrikh Kod trade complex by Vitruvius & Sons, vertical fins and numeric bands turning commerce into stripe.Photo courtesy of Architizer.