A picture may paint a thousand words and may be open to various translations and interpretations, but this week I saw, too, that words can lose a lot in translation or in something being misunderstood, yet somehow it still has sufficient accuracy to portray a good image. Such is the interview that was published this weekend regarding my move to France, change in career direction and most important of all, my passion for my art work and teaching. I had been asked by the events coordinator at our local tourism office if I would do a “painting escapade” as part of a programme of events taking place during the half-term holidays where I now live in northwest France. As a result, the house was filled with chattering French art lovers all happily engaged in exploring paint mixing techniques and putting those techniques into practice with an autumnal still life painting. I don’t speak good French, so the tourism office coordinator was by my side translating my words – thank heavens! She also excitedly told me when they all arrived that a journalist was coming along at the end of the session to interview me for France’s leading regional daily newspaper Ouest-France. I was delighted and flattered and, having been a journalist or journalism lecturer for most of my career, was also amused at the thought of being interviewed instead of doing the interview. Of course he spoke French and I didn’t so it was a 3-way interview through an interpreter, but it all went off OK and lo and behold, I got a colour article in the weekend edition and dashed out to buy a copy. Some of the details are slightly off beam – especially the bit about moving to Italy as I have never even visited the country – but it was close enough overall to be a fair picture of my new life painting and drawing and teaching these favourite pastimes both to regulars in my art classes and to people coming out to us for tutored holidays. What was particularly interesting in conversations during both the ‘escapade’ and the interview was that it seems unusual in this country that an artist is happy to work in a multitude of media and styles. I was asked numerous times during the day which medium I preferred to work in: oils, acrylics, watercolours, pencil, charcoal, pastel???? When I replied each time that it depended on the subject – or even the person commissioning me to do a piece of work – they seemed to be astonished and would push once again for me to name my favourite medium. Little wonder then, I suppose, that he used the headline for the article: “Angela Birchall, une artiste aux multiples talents”.