The road begins at our feet, a pale ribbon of gravel still cool from the night, and winds away up the hillside in long, easy curves. On either side, tall cypresses stand like sentries, dark green and perfectly upright, their pointed tips just catching the first light. They lead the eye up the slope, one after another, all the way to the top of the hill.
There, a stone farmhouse sits beneath a terracotta roof, its walls warmed to the colour of honey. A few more cypresses gather around it like old friends. Nobody is visible, but it is easy to imagine a kitchen window lit, a kettle on, the day about to begin.
The hills roll away in every direction, soft and rounded, their fields shading from wheat to olive to sage. Mist still lies in the hollows between them, pooled in the valleys like milk, and the more distant ridges fade into it until they are only pale outlines. The air feels damp and fresh, the kind of morning when sound carries a long way.
Above it all, the sky is a wash of colour that changes as it rises: rose and apricot near the horizon, then dove grey, then a cool slate blue overhead. A thin crescent moon has not yet left, hanging small and silver in the upper right, as if reluctant to give the day away.
The painting is made in loose, wet-on-wet watercolour, where colours are dropped into damp paper and allowed to bloom and soften. Edges blur, the mist is simply bare paper left untouched, and the cypresses are laid in with a few quick, confident strokes. It is a picture of quiet anticipation, a road that promises somewhere worth arriving.