One of the friends I made when I was a Baptist minister in the south of France was Suzanne. Before she moved from Britain to Toulouse she always found around this time of year that life began to be lived in a minor key and that before too long she’d be in a full-blown depression and struggling to survive it. She was diagnosed as suffering from SAD – a seasonal affective disorder supposedly linked to the dark season.

Suzanne thought that since this common illness is linked to the shorter days, she’d be better off in the sunny south of France where winter is far less severe than it is in this country and where you often get mild and sunny days even in the dreaded months of November, December, January and February.  Not a bit of it: if anything the depressions became even more pitiless and hope even more difficult to scrape together than before. After three winters with us, Suzanne went back home to Britain – she reasoned that at least she’d have the family around her back home.

So, a few years further on, what a joy it was to get a postcard from Suzanne only last week with an invitation to visit her website and read about a solo exhibition she’s put on. In fact, you can see some of her paintings on the internet, vibrant flower paintings for the most part and many of them marked ‘sold’. In her explanations, Suzanne talks again and again about having learned things about herself, the world and about God that she couldn’t have learned in any other way than by going through the severe school of depression. Henry de Montherlant was of the opinion that ‘happiness writes white’,  and Suzanne would agree with that – the joy of her paintings comes from the fact that they have been done with a palette that includes the colours of pain.