Paris Blog Love

Unfortunately my unhealthy Paris lifestyle has caught up with me and on this, my first free weekday in Paris without art class, I am stuck home with a "mal au gorge" (sore throat) and a small fever, seemingly working it's way along towards a head cold and maybe even laryngitis. Zut alors!!! Hard to speak French when you can't speak at all!

In San Francisco I am very healthy - I exercise a lot and eat low-carb/high protein/high fiber every day, I go to bed early and get up after a full 9 hours of sleep, never drink caffeine, and I haven't been sick in a long long time. But here in Paris, I stay up late, consume croissants and chocolate and coffee as much as possible, and drink wine at LUNCH of all unhealthy habits (well, I admit I drink a lot of wine in the US, too, but rarely at LUNCH). After all that abuse, I guess I deserve to get sick. Let's hope my little rheum/cold doesn't get worse, because my husband arrives Sunday and I want to greet him at the airport looking spiffy!

Anyway, I've spent my sick-ey afternoon online, catching up on all my favorite Paris blogs and bookmarking all the places they mention that I plan to visit once I am healthy again. So I thought I'd share some of my favorite bloggers.

First off though, I have discovered something extraordinary about Google Maps. As if I didn't already have much to love about Google, they went and made their maps customizable. Yes, you can put your own pushpins on the map with your own notes, you can plan routes and share your saved maps with friends. What riches!!!

On my own Paris 2008 Google map I've marked everything from the bank ATM's that don't charge me a fee to restaurants and all the little gems of Paris I plan to visit. I can even plot a walking route and find out it is 3,216 feet from the exit of the Louvre to Le Souffle restaurant, where Dad and Andrew and I dined the other day.

How to Make Your own Google Map
Go to maps.google.com and click the little orange tab under the Google logo (I bet you've never even noticed it) which says... "My Maps". Oh la la!! From there you can save locations and mark routes and edit them to your heart's delight. (Yes, my friends and family think I am a bit obsessive about planning vacation details as I have been known to make elaborate travel maps in Adobe Illustrator... but if Google has gone to the trouble of offering this functionality, I can't be alone in my obsession, can I?) Anyway, moving on....

My Plus Favorite Paris Blogs
Polly Vous Francaise is written by a charming American expat who shares so many of my tastes I am sure she and I would be fine friends if we met.

I Prefer Paris is written by a fabulous American expat in the Marias who shares many hidden secrets of Paris and even offers guided tours.

Paris Breakfast is one I discovered back when I was doing A Painting a Day and have loved following along with her little watercolors of her various marvelous petit dejeuners in Paris ever since. What's not to like about a blogger who loves Paris and breakfast and painting as much as I do?

King Nigrito is a cute mystery man, 23 cm tall and made of leather and resembling a mouse (maybe?). He gets around and has photos of himself at his favorite spots. Very useful for me, as he happens to haunt my adopted arrondissement/neighborhood and the day after one of his posts you can reliably find a very quiet 30-something American woman in hat or scarf or both, trying not to look or sound too American, testing out King Nigritos' very seat and surreptitiously making notes in her Moleskine Paris Guide.

(You don't know what a Moleskine City Guide is? Get one now!!!)

Ok, enough blogging for today. I'm going to make some tea and watch Paris channel 135, which according to my Dad's husband Andrew has old American classic movies subtitled in French. Magnifique!!

Louvre Sketch - Hutin Sculpture

Sketch after Charles-Francois HUTIN

This my sketch of a small, 30-inch sculpture done by Hutin in 1744 as his final exit project to graduate from the Royal French Academy.

Photos of the Louvre Pyramid

See my photos of the Louvre at dusk

Paris Photos

See photos of my walk to school and the art studio.

See photos of my perfect day Saturday 4/19, walking around Paris.

Paris! A tale of ethernet cables and "veau"....

I arrived yesterday and until a few hours ago it was mostly tedious and boring, dealing with getting a functioning local cellphone and accessing the internet in my apartment which both required trips to several locations in the city to buy wires (NEVER travel without an ethernet cable!!!) and special parts to make the phone work. I learned that the French word for ethernet cord is......... "ethernet cord". On the plus side, it gave me many opportunities to parle en francaise with the natives, and everyone replies to me in French, so even though I never learned any grammar and have forgotten what miserable shreds of tense conjugation I once had, I think I am successfully speaking French.

There were a few brief moments last night and today when I felt like I was in Paris - crossing the Seine over an uplit bridge as I walked home after dark last night, catching my first glimpse of that special tower which holds rank as the world's favorite keychain fob. But mainly it's been a maze of hunting down the closest Monoprix grocery store and returning to my apartment to repeatedly enter a 30-digit passcode into what I have come to believe is an imaginary "wireless" connection. Thus the cord.

But eventually I got myself trussed safely back into the various virtual networks I need to feel sane (and connected to my painfully far away husband) and finally I was able to relax and start feeling the Paris vibe.

And now I'd like to sing the praises of Monoprix.... a store that is the prettiest, most compact and city-fied Walmart you'll every see. I bought a travel sewing kit, asparagus, kelloggs brand cereal, a grid-ruled notebook, proscuitto, and a polka dot scarf, among other things. If I were so inclined I also could have bought baby girl dresses, plastic picnic ware, a sack of croissants, and the entire Neutrogena line of skin care products. I restrained myself, at least for now.

When the groceries were put away in my microscopic fridge I went to a cafe around the corner for dinner and and despite the goofy dancing tomato logo on the awning the food was divine: I had "veau" which I need to look up because I don't even know what kind of meat I was eating, but it was sooo good, tender meat on a t-bone with a creamy sauce. Had that along with a carafe du vin bordeaux and finished it all off with mousse au chocolat which unexpectedly had little chips all over the top which at first I thought were chopped nuts but turned out to TOFFEE and wow... if there is ever a proper topping for chocolate mousse it is little bits of toffee.

So, now I feel like I am here :)

Oh, and the apartment I rented is just lovely - artsy and quirky as only the french can manage, the owner has decorated with tiny antique chests and huge gold-framed mirrors paired with modern reflective tile in the bathroom and kitchen, with pickled white hardwood floors throughout. Very cute, very eclectic. Buddahs and framed oil paintings and weird little lamps on doilies abound. And a tiny 6-inch window above the bed, just big enough to crack open and let in a tiny whiff of damp Paris nighttime air, the best air on the planet in my humble opinion.

Last Day in New York

Today I spent ALL DAY at the Met, it was fantastic!!

First off I had to track down Madam X, and discovered that they have devoted an entire gallery room to Sargent pantings. I was... agog. And the best part is it was nearly empty the whole time I was in there. (Maybe because they are renovating the American Wing so this layout is temporary, and also it is up and down stairs and rather hard to find and The Sargent Room is at the very end of rooms and rooms of American art. Anyway, I just felt I'd gone to heaven.)

What you can't see here are some exquisite landscapes on a wall to the right, including this incredible little painting of an Alpine Pool. And high up on another wall is The Wyndham Sisters. And truly, when you look at that painting, you can just about hear their silk gowns rustling on the white brocade couch.

Sketch after Velazquez' Juan de Pareja
approx. 6 x 6 inches, pencil on paper

This one is for my friend Shawn Kenney, who told me Velazquez' Juan de Pareja is one of his favorite paintings. So thanks to him mentioning that I sought it out and decided to do a little sketch.

Next up on my Met to-do list was to spend some time in the new Greek and Roman sculpture gallery. It has huge glass ceilings and a fountain making bubbling-water noises and as soon as you enter you start to breathe more deeply and slow down and really look. And there's lots to look at.

Sketch from an Aphrodite in Marble
Roman copy of a Greek orginal
Pencil on paper, approx 9 x 5 inches

Finally, I took another look at the Age of Rembrandt exhibit (see highlights from the exhibit here). This was actually my third visit to the Met this week, so I had already seen most the exhibit.

The exhibit was bigger than the Portland exhibit I went to last month, so it was nice to see a LOT of paintings. But, being the Met, it was really crowded. I would have loved to spend some time drawing Aristotle's Sleeves, but the place was just too mobbed.

So today was our last day in New York. I've added more pictures to my NY Picasa Album. Some are arty "photographs", some are just snapshots taken with the crappy camera phone. (The arty-est one is the blue billowing tarp over a dumpster, you have to agree.)

Next it's home and back to the studio. Stay tuned!!

Drawing at the Met

Sketch after Michaelangelo

Sketch after Leonardo

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can make an appointment at the Drawing Study Room, which is like a library, and they will pull any drawing you want to see from their collection and put it on a stand on the table in front of you. Wow... so I went and did this today, and of course had to choose their two most famous drawings, Michaelangelo's Study for the Libyan Sibyl and Leonardo's Head of the Virgin. I only had a short time with each, and I was pretty overwhelmed with being in the presence of a 499 year old drawing, but I enjoyed the chance to get a good look at them. I'm also inspired to do more master copies from reproductions at home.

Today I also visited Grand Central Academy of Art today. Dan Thompson teaches there and he was kind enough to give me a tour. The school is set up in four huge old classrooms on the 6th floor of a midtown building. Each room is dedicated to a single pursuit: figure study, cast drawings, sculpture for painters, etc, and they have arranged the lighting and painted the walls to be perfect for each pursuit. The school is gathering an amazing collection of casts, and everywhere you see statues set up with lights, stacked in corners, tacked to walls, with students busily working away on detailed pencil drawings.

I've now visited Studio Incamminati, Gage Academy, and Barnstone Studios - between all these, I have certainly had a great little tour of the "American atelier movement" these last few weeks.

Frick Frack etc...

Sketches from the Frick

I spent a couple hours at the Frick Collection today. It wasn't very busy so I could stand and draw without being jostled by throngs. I sketched a Rembrandt self-portrait from 1658, and the lady from Vermeer's "Mistress & Maid" - the mistress is receiving an apparently unexpected letter from her maid, thus the gesture of surprise.

Front steps of the Frick Collection

I also visited 4 galleries today, but I was only really excited by two of them:

Forum Gallery
A works on paper exhibit with some good Modern and contemporary specimens. Got to see my first Stephen Assael up close and in person. He seems to scrape away a lot with a knife of some sort, so he layers lots of dark marks with graphite and charcoal, and then white marks with the scraping. The show as a whole seemed a bit jumbled though, with only the fact that the work was on paper holding it all together.

Hirschle & Adler
A great show of still lifes by Paul Rahilly. His color technique is very impressive - he uses tons of color but manages to keep a compelling value range as well. The gallery was also showing selections from the permanent collection, including these "Allegorical Figures in Blue/Pink" which were just luscious to see up close.

New York is of course all about walking.... and walking.... and taking the subway. I quickly gave up on trying to wear even semi-attractive shoes and have been comfortably clomping around in my San Francisco standard-issue chartreuse green Keens. (I just try to stay out of the way of the many model-types who seem to glide effortlessly down the street in their white headbands, huge sunglasses, and smart little pumps.)

The heat hasn't been record-breaking, just high 80's, but being from San Francisco even 80's is shockingly warm, and the subway platforms are just about unbearable. It's supposed to rain Friday so maybe the heat will break soon. Ah, September in NY!

Rembrandt in Portland, OR

I visited Portland Museum of Art to see the Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art exhibit. The work is on tour from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum while that museum is being renovated. It was wonderful to see the Rembrandts in person, I love to stare at his brush strokes and try to fathom how he builds up from transparent darkness to his signature clotted, swirly lights.

As for the other Dutch Masters, I was especially entranced by this Still Life by Jan van de Velde, which surprised me. The reproduction does not do it justice at all, but the painting was just captivating in person. Even standing within inches from the canvas, the illusion of the glass objects emerging from the dark background is never broken. More than just stunning hyper-realism, this painting has a magical, captivating feeling.

(An interesting footnote - smoking was considered a sin, but the wealthy, pious Dutch liked to hang images of the vices they rejected, as a way to display their own righteousness. Which is why so many Dutch still lifes feature pipes and smoking paraphernalia. I wonder, would that be the equivalent of our own most wealthy and pious members of society displaying images of illegal drug paraphernalia?)

At the museum store I bought a fascinating book: Art in the Making: Rembrandt which has gorgeous close-ups of Rembrandt's brush strokes, as well as magnified cross-sections of the paint layers, and analysis of what pigments he used and how he used them. Very fun to find such a technical book.

While in Portland I visited my college friend, painter Scott Conary, whom I had not seen in person in 14 years. He and his wife were kind enough to put me up for the night, and we drank wine and talked art for hours. We had some good discussions, because he does not understand my fascination with classical realism, but at least he liked what I showed him of Michael Grimaldi so we found some common ground :)

Studio Incamminati

Studio Incamminati interior, artist of the foreground painting unknown

On BACAA founder Linda Dulaney's suggestion, I dropped by Studio Incamminati, a classical atelier art school in Philadelphia. I should have called ahead first, but they were very welcoming and accommodating, and a friendly student offered to give us a tour.

They have a lovely large space on the 4th floor of a downtown converted loft building. There they have set up 3 separate areas for a model to pose, with easels arranged in a circle for 10-15 students to work. We were told second-year students study with natural light near the large bank of windows, but first-year students start with artificial light in order to see sharp shadows and clear form.

The walls are covered with the very impressive drawings and paintings of students, along with beautiful demonstration drawings and paintings by instructors including those by Ted Seth Jacobs and Incamminati founder Nelson Shanks.

The student artwork was displayed in multiple stages, and it was fun to see them using the same methods I have been recently learning, starting with the block-in for both drawings and paintings. They even had the same kind of graphic, high-key color studies I did last week, and sure enough they were done in a workshop with Dan Thompson.

Rodin Museum

The Shade (foreground) and Adam (background)

Nowell and I got a chance to spend a couple hours at Phildelphia's Rodin Museum. Nowell had never been to the museum or seen so many Rodin works in one place so it was fun to see how much he loved the artwork.

Nowell pretending to "knock" on Rodin's Gates of Hell

Detail from Gates of Hell

Rodin's larger-than life sculpture Adam

My drawing of Adam

It was interesting to try out my newly learned "block-in" technique to sketch the sculpture. As I've been practicing recently, I used all straight lines, starting with long lines to create a large "envelope" polygon, and then cutting into it with shorter and short straight lines till the figure emerges.

It was fascinating to discover through the drawing process the zig-zag diagonals Rodin designed. Adam's weight bearing leg makes a nearly perfectly vertical line up to the back of his head, but everything else is a diagonal wrapping around that stable central axis. You can see his wrist, his right knee, and his left ankle are all on a straight diagonal line, nearly perpendicular to the diagonal line made by the left hip and right knee. And perfectly parallel to that hip/knee line is another diagonal going from the crease of his waist at the side to the inside crease of the wrist, and another parallel line from the elbow past the armpit to the sharp bend of the far shoulder blade on the back.

The thing I wonder about this approach though, is although the gesture is captured and the proportions are accurate, the drawing itself does not look very dynamic. Previous to my recent introduction to classical drawing, I would have scribbled and erased and made a much less accurate but also more energetic drawing.

I guess when I get faster with this process I'll be able to make energetic marks that are also accurate. That's my hope at least. And despite the tentativeness of the drawing, I really loved having the chance to draw from such an amazing work of art.

Barnstone Studios, Coplay PA

While in Pennsylvania this past week I made sure to take a side trip to visit Barnstone Studios, where both Juliette Aristides and Dan Thompson studied for several years. I called first and spoke to founder Myron Barnstone who welcomed me to come that evening to observe a class.

I walked up the stairs on a late afternoon summer day and entered what I consider to be art school heaven.

The entire 3rd floor of the building is one big room with white walls, white ceiling, and wooden floor and windows all the way around. All the windows were open and several fans were on to combat the sweltering day, so the air was cool and the room was bright with ambient natural light. Drawing benches were set up around a central drawing stand and a few students milled around talking quietly while waiting for class to start.

Student artwork covered movable white walls arranged around the room, all excellent but the most striking being a series of larger-than-life figure drawings on huge paper done by an 18 year old student who had already been studying at Barnstone for 6 years. My envy was palpable I am sure.

In the middle of it all was Myron Barnstone who surprised me by rising to greet me enthusiastically and then spending 20 minutes to give me a personal tour of the space, gesturing at student artwork while he talked with a laser light pen. He then invited me to stay and observe the drawing class which was about to begin.

The students began to draw from the posed figure. First they lightly sketched the three-dimensional cubes of the head, torso and pelvis and a center line. Next they seemed to focus on the features of the face, which surprised me. Then main lines of the full figure were sketched in lightly with a series of straight lines, and at intersections the students drew dark points with their charcoal.

I could not see how this method would be successful, but within the short, 10-minute poses I saw several students create convincing figures, with drawings that resembled to me a three-dimensional transparent wireframe with hard points at the intersections. (I did not take the class so I am sure I am getting this wrong, but it's how it appeared to me.)

Mr. Barnstone circled the room quickly, barking out sharp corrections to individual students. He is a white-bearded, intimidating figure who does not hesitate to take over the charcoal to demonstrate a better angle, but who also punctuates his comments with winks or the occasional joking threat to "cut off a toe" of any student who does not follow his instruction. His students are quietly deferential and he clearly runs a tight ship, but the overall attitude is that everyone is enthusiastic to learn from him.

After a few 10-minute poses we are all called to the lecture room, a corner blocked off in the back with rows of folding chairs and an ingenious glass wall which is a rear-projection slide projector. Myron Barnstone flips through maybe 30 slides in 20 minutes, diagramming a wide range of master drawings with Phi diagrams overlays, derived from the Golden Section. He shows how the strict conformity of the drawings to the Phi system, from ancient Egyptian murals up through Sargent portraits, is so exact that any suggestion that the system is intuitive or accidental is laughable.

I was somewhat familiar with the basic concept of the Golden Section from Juliette's introduction at her workshop, and what she describes in her drawing book Classical Drawing Atelier.

Mr. Barnstone kept referring to a "Root 2" and "Root 5" Golden Section, terms I was not familiar with, but my questions were answered when he invited me to watch a video of another one his lectures. I took lots of notes but couldn't capture everything. Here are some of my notes:

After the lecture I asked him if there are any books that teach the Golden Section as applied to art. He recommended about 10 books to me, but said what he teaches is not offered in any one of them.

He said again and again: Creating art is not the slavish copying of what we see, but intentional design. He feels that great art is a modified version of what we see - as he has written on a plaque: Select, Emphasize, Exaggerate, Entend, Elaborate, Refine

I asked him if he feels there is a current revival in the study of classical art. He surprised me by saying emphatically No. He says there is a revival in the interest in making pictures using classical techniques, but not everyone is making art with those techniques. He says he is most interested in artists who use what they have learned to make new, relevant contemporary artwork.

He says there is no use in repeating, going back to what was done before, but that we must use these concepts to make art that resonates today. As illustration of this he mentioned several artists, including Ann Gale, an artist whom I just discovered on my own a couple weeks ago.

He also had a lot to say about color - that most classical paintings are of the "brown school" of color, like Ingres or Rembrandt which are mostly shades of brown, black and yellow. And that now we know so much more about color that we should not bother using color the way the Old Masters did. This was also a familiar concept after working with Dan for the last couple weeks.

I left scheming about when and for how long I could steal away to study at Barnstone Studios. I am hoping I can study there next year for a couple months.

I should caveat all this by saying that I am not a journalist, and these notes are simply my perception of what Mr. Barnstone said. Nothing is an exact quote.