High Contrast Grey.

Sitting at a café in Montmartre as Jessye finally gets a break and writes a few postcards.

Sacre Coeur peeks up above the buildings in the mirror.

For as French as this café was, for whatever reason, the two times we went there they were playing Mexican music.

The first time we arrived, we stood in the doorway waiting for a table and then the tiled floor opened up and a small elevator with a crate of cola surfaced.

Jessye at our favorite Parisian bar.

Coffee and cognac.

It was great having her come and visit. It was as if we hadn’t missed a beat while I have been in France and things were just as if we had been together this entire time.

In our French bar and café hopping we came up with the pipe dream of taking back the idea of these beautiful French places and opening up an ex-pat French café that also serves alcoholic drinks, like café calva and vin chaud.

After a day wandering the Parisien streets we decided to finish our brief Paris trip with a stop off at the Arc de Triomphe.

It dwarfs with its size.

After taking some cliché tourist photos (those things that everyone takes, but no one really looks at) we took the tunnel under the street to climb up in the in the middle and see it first hand. Capitalism had another plan since it seemed that it would cost 6 euros each just to wander around the base. Fulya decided that we should just enter through the exit. As we left we noticed that some officers had stationed themselves at the top of the stairway, but as we went up it just became apparent that paying would be ridiculous. The shape of the Arc created a wind tunnel of cold night air, so we stayed mostly in the other tunnel of the arc that was shielded from the wind.

A girl in a hooded jacket sitting off to the side makes momentary eye contact but then looks down at a journal or sketchbook. I assume she is making observations of the diverse crowd of people at the Arc.

After leaving we take the metro again. In a confusion of which stop to take I get out too soon and jump back in just as the doors close. I make it in but in the instant that I make it though and the doors close it they close on my camera bag trapping it in the door. The strap snaps as if it required no force at all. We pull and try to twist it through the opening in the door but it is tightly shut. Finally the door releases slightly and I pull the bag through. The front cover of my sketch book has been dented, folded. But thankfully nothing is wrong with my camera.

I sew the strap back together on the foggy car ride back to Rennes. We awkwardly sleep sitting up in the backseat for most of the ride back. Our driver is a balding Algerian dental assitant who wear metal rimmed glasses. I fear we frustrated him as we both slept in the back, where he was actually wanting to have more conversation.

La boheme plays over his stereo system. I can’t seem to escape this song, but I also can’t seem to track it down in French and not English to download.

Our next day in Paris we took a stroll without destination through Montmartre. Of course stopping by the square filled with artists to look at their work. Since the cliché for paintings here is that of street scenes of French architecture I was entralled to see new techniques and ideas. Perhaps it isn’t really the avant-garde of modern art, but it pleased me a lot to look at. There was one of the artists who used a piece of bamboo cut into a point as a quill pen that he would dip into a small jar of ink. This was then followed by watercolor that turned the picture into a beautiful colored painting. Simple, but the detail was amazing with the erratic line quality.

The simple watercolor paintings that I have been coming across in France have led to quite a lot of inspiration for me, but I just hope that I will be able to use this inspiration improve my own watercolors. Perhaps when I no longer have to worry about my paintings for painting class.

We met an Egyptian who told us that even though he was born in Egypt, his soul is French. His paintings looked a bit like color field theory, but not in the way that student’s work looks. There were layers built up and then the paint was paired with gold leaf. It changed color with every angle.

They talked about art. His inspiration. His subject matter abstracted. They talked about the problems of the world and how it seems that the major powers are all about to shift.

Parisien breakfast.

Whoever told the French that slicing a baguette in half and pairing it with a very light spread of butter and jam constitiues a breakfast should have been given a medal. At least three of those large desktop medals in boxes that I keep coming across at the antique markets.

Getting up in the morning in the hostel in Paris, as seen with the personified figurine.

The hostel was dirt cheap (for Paris at least) with the bed spread matching the curtains and yet we still somehow figured out a private room. Though perhaps with walls as thin as they were, “private” isn’t exactly the correct word to use.

At some point in the night I was woken up by the sounds of a female voice in the midst of sexual ecstasy. Which was then followed by another. And another. And another. It seemed that they whole section of the hostel where we were sleeping was having sex.

Creating a musical, an opera, of just heavy breathing.

Although what I found to be odd was that all I could hear were the female halves of the couples, and perhaps this was because there was no male half, but yet the slapping of skin seemed to sound more like the pairing of male female than just female female. This was just an odd observation until the older couple started up and the male voice equaled his female partner.

Perhaps this stems from the fact that the male figure in porn rarely makes any noise, aside from stupid sexist comments, and has bled its ways into normal sex lives.

I am not sure how Fulya slept through all this. But in the morning she got to hear the older couple go at it again and settled the question of where they were from. I thought that I had heard the woman say “niet” while in the throws the night before and assumed that they were both Russian, but in the morning, with Fulya’s better hearing, we came to find that she was English and he was African, but spoke English as well. They also didn’t seem to know eachother too well.. 

My wanderings lead me to a building of artist studios.

The indent on the floor by the front door, normally reserved for a floor mat of some form, has been filled with coins of low monetary value. To step on it, or to step over it..

The spiral staircase inside has been painted. Decorated erratically. Strips of fabic hang down the center opening.

Every artist showing their work is distinctively different from one another. No stagnation in multiple people pushing a single style. I wish I could have had some more time to look at everything.

I wander the Paris streets on my own. The city of light lives up to its name.

I give an explaination for leaving the others at the museum for wanting to find the “art de le rue.”

Une flânerie in a radiating spiral. Letting my eyes work like magpies and wander towards the shiny and the pretties.

An store of faux antiquities.

Cheap knockoffs being sold on the street right next to the expensive department store doors.

The Eiffel Tower seen from Centre Pompidou.

Me (as a painted Tintin figurine) regarding Otto Dix and Christian Schad.

Centre Pompidou.

The next floor we went to was much more my style and interest. As we had aldready spent a lot of our time on the first floor I tried my best to quickly make it though this floor but was constantly finding myself having to stop in my tracks with paintings and art pieces in styles and movements I had only read about or seen obscure pieces of before which were now in front of me. So close my breath could fog the glass if I so pleased.

In the description of the Otto Dix before me it stated that watercolor had been used although I wasn’t sure for what part..

It is sad just how much destruction was caused by the second world war and even in the hypothetical where the art movements that were flourishing became derailed and scattered. If such movements had been allowed to continue and mature I wonder what changes the art world would have seen.

Centre Pompidou.

I like Olympia in Black Face. (1970) Larry Rivers.

The first floor we were allowed to explore by means of our wily talking skills was filled with oeuvres of movements from the 1960s. Lots of art pieces that existed more so as “ideas than art pieces” as put by Fulya. It was pretty dense to get though because almost every piece required reading a rather lenghty back story, well all of the pieces that included back stories.

The three other study abroad students in my painting class and me went to Paris via a free bus ride with a collection of the other fine art students from our university. Are names were on a roll call but not on the list for when we were to get a tour of Pompidou, so we went on our own and talked our way into the museum for free.

I go to San Francisco and I get gum on my shoe. I go to Paris and it rains.

Drinking wine all afternoon working on my final for my summer painting class.

An intersection in Paris in 1910 referenced and provided by Eugene Atget.

I still need to sketch in the other side before continuing the undercoat, but I was getting impatient and wanted some definition to all the lines I have been putting onto the canvas.