Welcome to the blog of Melanie McDonald ! I'm a professional artist, my life is divided between my home in Newquay, Cornwall and my renovation project - an 18th Century farm - in North Brittany, France. My inspiration comes from the beautiful beaches, skies and seas of Cornwall, Brittany and Scotland. This is where I share my paintings and photographs, I hope it inspires you.
The road of life
How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: 'Your life is so simple.' 'Your life seems always to go in a straight line.' Whenever they said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: 'You have chosen the easiest terrain.' But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way - and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance - that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: 'Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?' as though there were nothing further to be said.
An excerpt from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles - a dark, haunting adventure story of a New York couple travelling in remote north Africa after World War II. Set against a backdrop of powerful, intensely observed desert landscape, Bowles describes this book as 'a combination of memory writing and minute descriptions of whatever place I was in at that moment'.
Here are some of my 'road' photographs - taken in the Scottish Hebrides, north west Brittany and Wales.
Above - Road to the Cuillin Hills, Isle of Skye, Scotland
Road to the sea, Ploumanac'h. Brittany
Country road, Isle of Mull, Scotland
Road on Iona, Scotland
Road to the house between rocks, Plougrescant, Brittany
Road home, Bretagne
Ancient road and pigeon house, Brittany
Dusk road, Wales
Road (closed) to the lighthouse, Brittany
Road to Wales, U.K.
