I love the Orsay. One of the benefits of being here for the month of August is that it makes sense just to join the museum and go frequently. The last several years it has fed my work, sitting in there and drinking in Odilon Redon, Vuillard, Van Gogh, Manet, Klimt. Yesterday was my first day on my own (without meet ups with lovely friends), so I headed straight there. Sadly there is little Redon this year (they constantly change up their exhibitions, which is another reason to keep joining — it’s a different museum every summer), but they had a huge Vuillard donation recently, and there’s a whole section devoted largely to him that is absolutely exquisite. Including one of my favorite pieces of his that is back on display after a couple of years of missing it. I mostly just wandered and looked, but I did a little sketching late in my stay. I stumbled on a lovely Swiss piece by a painter I didn’t know, and it’s got the same feeling I’ve been exploring lately of a sole person in a large world, so of course I sketched it.

Nearby was a room of Pompon’s sculptures. He’s the one who did the enormous polar bear that is the mascot of the Orsay, but there are a number of charming, smaller pieces upstairs as well.

I went to see this exhibition  at  the Seattle Art Museum yesterday, and it was a beautifully done show. Well arranged and documented with a spread of works across Wyeth's career. I learned more about him, which made me want to know even more. I had loved the Helga exhibition years ago but hadn't seen much more of his work in person. It truly repays up-close examination, with the minuteness of his brushstrokes. The thing that truly struck me was the radical nature of some of his compositions and viewpoints. It's easy, in this age of minimalizing realism, to discount Wyeth as the safe art of dorm room posters. That would be a mistake. Many of the strongest pieces had truly unexpected and dramatic viewpoints or compositions, the kind that make you reconsider how you see the world. 

Below is one of those. I loved the almost absence of sky with the strong abstract nature of the land and the water it held. The layers of darkness and detail in this piece are far greater than I could capture with a brush pen standing up in a crowd and balancing sketchbook and watercolor kit in my left hand. But I wanted to spend a little time with it and look more deeply, and sketching a painting helps me do that. 

The piece I was most gobsmacked by was the top one here of the home with drifting feathers. It struck me as Wyeth's version of Redon's drifting flowers or Chagall's pair of lovers in the sky. Mysticism within the artist's own recognizable language. I've been drawn to the surrealists the last couple of years, but without much idea how to make that work within my own vocabulary. This piece really stayed with me, and I hope it will help me see a new way to do this in my own work. 

The show was a mixed bag for me. The best were transporting, with the exquisiteness of texture and detail adding to the subject. Some, however, I found to be lifeless, drained by the too painstaking style. The watercolors, with a bit more freedom, were more successful to my eye than the tempera ones (to make a broad generalization). There were several early and loose watercolors in the show that took my breath away. I loved his color and style, and they reminded me of the looseness and lushness of Sargent's watercolors. Apparently Wyeth, in spite of a huge success with them in New York, found them to be insufficiently challenging to make a career of, and he moved to the much more detailed style instead. That grieved me a bit, but it was also heartening to see a realist making a successful career in the midst of an abstract age.

​Landscape painting gets little respect these days, and while he painting many people as well, I loved seeing how he took his home landscape, unremarkable by the standards of dramatic landscape beauty that seems so common in art, and translated his love of his place and his vision of the earth to others. It was encouraging to see him make such a respected career out of the bones of his home spaces. Coming as I do from a visually unremarkable but much loved place of my own, I always hope to be able to translate that beauty for others to see and appreciate. 

His wife Betsy helped tremendously on the marketing and selling side of things. Any artist would be lucky to have such a helpmate, since business sense and creativity are not necessarily paired talents, but it was still encouraging to see him be able to be so successful on his own terms. 

I had a couple of quiet days on my own at the end of my Paris trip. Some of that, of course, was packing madly, because I acquired too many art books plus a framed print plus a little bit of breakable tea crockery, so it was more challenging than usual.

I knew I would be coming home to working hard on my fall shows, so I gave myself permission to really have a little bit of vacation --- sleeping in and lingering over tea in the beautiful apartment I stay in and going to the Musee d'Orsay to sit with my favorite pieces. I also had tea a couple of afternoons in Le Lithographe, the cafe just across from my building there. I'd been wanting to paint inside (usually I would sit out on the sidewalk to watch Paris go by) where there was a lovely tiled Art Deco piece next to the bar. I painted it small the first day, and since I'm thinking about Art Deco ornamentation a good bit at the moment (thanks to one of the art books I bought), I went back and painted a second time with more detail.

I also did a couple of more sketches in the Orsay. They move their paintings around a lot and swap things out. One of my favorite Odilon Redon pieces was gone (one of my favorite pieces period there), but this double panel was new to me this year, so I sketched it. As was the Vuillard, who painted a woman sketching with that hallmark "sketch face," as a friend of mine calls it.

One other thing I did was got myself one last cup of Angelina's hot chocolate and carried it into the Tuileries to sit and drink and (apparently) sketch. It was a lovely send off from a city I love and hope to return to next year.

My friend Jill and I went to Giverny her last day here. I hadn't been before, and it was stunning. My dad has been telling me I needed to get there, and I'm glad I did. It's always powerful to stand in the spaces artists you admire have painted in, and seeing Monet's home so beautifully intact gave me a further feeling for the man. One tremendous surprise was his collection of Japanese prints hung all over the house. The Impressionists were the first group of painters who had access to the exquisite woodblock prints of Hiroshige and his contemporaries, and it made a huge impact on their art. Getting to see the specific prints Monet lived with and was inspired by was enormous for me.

We didn't have a huge amount of time, and it got flooded with people as the morning went on, but I did have to do just one sketch of the beautiful colors he used in his home. I now want a yellow kitchen. I'm adding in some of my photos too, just to show the beauty of the place.

I've been having quiet mornings and walking to museums in the afternoons. Today was the Orangerie, which had an exhitbition of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works from a collection in Tokyo that was well worth seeing. Then I couldn't resist going upstairs to the rooms with the enormous, all encompassing late water lily paintings of Monet. It was crowded, but I still love sitting in those rooms. (The back room is never as pushed as the front one.) And I always want to sketch. Today I didn't even try to get any details of the paintings. I just did a quick sketch in the general palette, which happened to match the French ink I just bought. It was fun to go for the impression. I had done more precise work this morning, working on the Mr. Darcy book, so it was nice just to surf art and sketch loosely for the afternoon.

I followed about the same pattern yesterday and went the Musee d'Orsay instead. I didn't even sketch inside, just a quickish view from out on the roof, yesterday being one of the rare and unpredictable days they allow people out to enjoy the stunning view.

I did a lot more walking today and once again ended up in the Musee d'Orsay. The nice thing about getting a pass is that I can go and do several rooms deeply without having to see the whole museum. I can also take time to sketch. They move and switch out the artwork. This Redon wasn't out last year, and it really moved me. I love the figure rising out of the ocean. So I sketched him standing up (and halfway in the dark -- they keep the symbolism rooms super dark for some reason) and then sat down out in the middle and sketched a few people. I need to get in more practice doing people, and Paris is a great place for that.

I also did one quick sketch in the Tuileries. I had tried to do a gouache study at lunch, but I had forgotten the actual gouache in my jet lag fog. I'll have to go back and do it a different day.

I finished printing the first batch of "Midnight" this morning. The print is based on a journal sketch I did of Amanda Parer's art installation Intrude at the Brooks Museum in Memphis. I did a number of color tests on this one and ended up with a lighter sky and paper. I had thought that perhaps a darker gray would be nice, but it didn't pop as much.

I was completely enchanted with this lit up installation. I have a major illustration project in house right now for the national Presbyterian Church, and I have a show to hang March 1, and all my brain can think is "BUNNIES!! I want to make art about BUNNIES." You can see that I caved. Sometimes you just have to go with what's calling your name at that moment.

Here are the color tests I did.

And here is the original sketch.

I am so enjoying the Intrude exhibition at Brooks by Amanda Parer. It delights me. Mr. Darcy and I stopped to sketch again yesterday on our way home from the forest. I like the nocturne better, but it was fun to do this one as well.

For some serious happiness, treat yourself to two minutes of Bard Cole's marvelous video of the bunnies, beautifully edited and set to music. He caught me there sketching, but of course Mr. Darcy is the real star of that small clip. Thanks to WKNO for putting this out.