Paris: Louvre Sketch: Reni Hercules II

Sketchbook:

After Guido Reni's
"Hercules sur le bucher", 1619
Louvre, Paris

I went back to the Louvre and worked on my drawing some more based on some helpful comments from my teacher Tim Stotz, you can see my earlier version here.

Paris: Amelie Beaury-Saurel

Portrait of Caroline Remy Severine by Amelie Beaury-Saurel
Musee Carnavalet in Paris

I found this gorgeous portrait of a woman writer by a woman painter at the Musee Carnavalet. Turns out the painter AmelieBeaury-Saurel was a famous portrait painter in the late 19th century and ran a woman's art school. She was married to Rodolphe Julien, who established Academie Julien, a French art school women were allowed to attend.

Paris: Musee Carnavalet

How is it I have never been to Musee Carnavalet before? It's a museum about the history of Paris, and I guess I was never interested before because I'd heard it was all in French. I just thought it would have a bunch of stuffy exhibits with long explanations in French.

Turns out it's just a gorgeous gem of a museum. Starting with an incredible courtyard garden, it's an experience just to enter the beautiful scene. Even better, there was NO LINE at all, and on this particular day at least it was FREE. It felt like we'd stumbled on a secret museum!

Inside it's chock full of paintings of Paris, paintings in chronological order from throughout the history of painting. It was like a condensed tour of every era of French painting, but at a manageable scale, and all with Paris itself as the main subject.



In addition to the paintings, there are amazing exhibits and models - models of the Guillotine, the Bastille (the armory prison which was torn down during the Revolution and so no longer exists), models of Notre Dame and other churches, and tiny models of medieval Paris herself.

Because it's in two adjoining mansions and not in a huge museum building, we incorrectly assumed it was small. But after two hours we realized we had only seen the 16th century through the 18th century sections! There were still entire WINGS devoted to the Revolution, 19th century painting, and ancient, pre-Roman civilizations. We realized we'll have to come back again to really absorb it all. After three hours we were worn out, and we used our last shred of energy to buy the hardcover catalogue of the museum from the bookstore.

The best part about getting worn out in Paris is.... there's always a cafe nearby to recuperate in!

Paris: l'Oisive Tea

l'Oisive The

Yes, I am on vacation, so no new art. But I can share some recent small Paris treasures we have found!

One of my favorite things to do while traveling is track down little off-the-beaten path places. l'Oisive The is a tea house I read about on a blog a few weeks ago. I had never explored this particular neighborhood called La Butte aux Cailles and I am always looking for new places to love in Paris, so we launched out in the light rain, arm in arm under Nowell's umbrella.

I was thrilled when the tea house was even better than expected - it's quiet and cozy, and the owner is a friendly American woman. I have to say, after 6 weeks in Paris it was really nice to order in English! Nowell and I sampled some of the homemade treats, I had an amazing scone hot out of the oven, and the first one was so good I ordered a second right away. We shared a big pot of Lotus Royal tea, steeped with a large sachet hand-tied around the top of the teapot. The combination of the tea, the gentle rain outside, the soft downtempo music and decor of charming flowered tablecloths put us in a happy mellow mood.


The neighborhood is a real find too. It looks like a little village with cobblestone streets, bistro restaurants, tiny markets, and dotted with people walking small dogs and parents walking their small children home from school.

Paris: Fois Gras

Nowell and I found a restaurant the specializes in fois gras dishes - heaven! This is me under the sign after we ate there (sporting my stylish new Parisian parapluie/umbrella).

More art coming soon..... my plans to paint in the Luxembourg gardens have been delayed by rain, but the sun is scheduled to shine again later this week.

Paris: Louvre sketch: Reni Hercules

Sketchbook:
After Guido Reni's
"Hercules sur le bucher", 1619
Louvre, Paris

Luckily my husband loves museums too, so he was content to wander alone while I worked on this sketch.

I love this painting, how the ribcage feels like a heavy living mass of bone and connective tissues, sagging and stretching within a flexible network of skin and muscle barely holding everything together. The pelvis and ribcage are resenting their connection by the spine, each urging towards their own expression. The belly is only an afterthought, no intention of its own, merely subject to other forces. The limbs are all secondary, the gesture is complete in the torso.

Paris: Louvre Sketch after Pajou

Sketchbook:
After Augustin Pajou's "Pluto Chaining Cerberus", 1760

I brought Nowell to the 18th century French sculpture wing of the Louvre today. It was fun to watch his jaw drop as we rounded the corner into the Puget Courtyard, full of the examples of the pinnacle of figurative sculpture. He was content to roam around filming for a while I worked on this sketch.

Paris: Musee Rodin

Sketchbook
After Rodin's "The Three Shades"

Nowell and I spent the afternoon at the Rodin Museum in Paris. It currently has an excellent exhibit on Camille Claudelle, Rodin's mistress who was an accomplished a sculptor as Rodin. This life-size figure group is outdoors in the gorgeous garden of the museum.

Nowell recreated a picture we took six months ago at Philadelphia's Rodin Museum:

Paris: Medici Fountain

Sketchbook:
Medici Fountain, Luxembourg Gardens, Paris

Every time I come to Paris I visit Marie de Medici's Fountain, tucked away in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. The first time I drew this fountain was exactly 20 years ago, when I was 16 and in Paris for the first time. Maybe I can track down that old sketchbook and post my first drawing of the sculpture.

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!!

Studio Escalier Workshop: Final Drawings

Sarah Twice
18 x 24, graphite pencil on paper
9 hours each drawing

For our final week at Studio Escalier's Drawing Workshop in Paris we worked on two long poses to practice all the contour and modeling lessons we have been learning from Tim and Michelle - one pose in the mornings and one pose in the afternoons. I decided to put both my final drawings on the same sheet of paper - just a bit of extra challenge for fun.

Here's a slideshow of the stages of the drawings

I had critiques with both Tim and Michelle. Their comments were really helpful and give me a lot to work on for my future drawings:

I need to think about "packing the form" - the human body is made of irregularly shaped packed forms arranged on curves. I need to remember to define the top edges of those forms, the edges facing the light, as much as the bottom edges, the edges facing away from the light.

Also, in both these drawings I've over-modeled in the light. All the darkest shadow is on the side of the model turned way from me, so almost everything I saw was in the light. In my zeal for modeling form I made everything too dark.

I also need to practice seeing the forms arranged in fans arcing off of changes of direction on the contour.

Finally, I need to emphasize structure and solidity, otherwise my approach with soft gradation tends to look too wispy. I agree. I am not interested in making pretty drawings, I want to make strong drawings.

Not only have I learned a lot about drawing from this workshop, but also my expectations for myself have been raised in the process. I have a vision for how well I will someday be able to draw, a vision for how I could draw with a lot of practice and investigation, and it's far more developed than I ever expected of myself before.

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.