Being Back Home

I've been home for five days now but I am honestly still adjusting. Jumping into a 45 hour work week right away was probably not the smartest think for me to do..but its a little too late for that!

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So now that my 3 weeks of living in Paris has ended, I have a whole new outlook on Paris. It is a fast-paced, vibrant, romantic, fragrant, invigorating, refreshing change of pace from the life I'm used to in Minneapolis. Every single day I was there, I was overstimulated (in a good way), inspired, fascinated, awe-struck, humbled, and exhausted (also in a good way).

Now that I have spent time abroad, I feel 2024234 times more comfortable being somewhere unfamiliar. Before this trip, I was incredibly anxious about the culture shock and the language barrier. The first couple of days there were not easy, but it slowly got easier and easier to communicate and I became more and more comfortable.

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I am crazy familiar with French art, literature, and music now and subsequently have a new appreciation for a few pieces that I became familiar with over the course of this trip. The first is Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune". What's actually funny about this piece is that I have this song on a bedtime playlist I put together a longggg time ago. I liked it but was not at all familiar with it all. Now I'm obsessed.   Genius ¯

After visiting Giverny and learning all about his life and family, I have a whole new appreciation for Monet. What he did was incredible. It's amazing that he put in all that time and effort into his art and garden - I feel like its rare nowadays to see dedication like that. I am also biased because I love flowers.

 

My last new obsession is Picasso. In my avant post I said that I enjoy his work. Such an understatement now. I've mentioned how cool/crazy he was in a previous blog post, but let me recap. He was such a goof. His work is completely reflective of that. His ambition inspired artists not only in his own generation but all generations following.

As for my hopes for Paris: total success. I really hoped that seeing amazing paintings would inspire me in my own arts and inspire me to try new styles of painting that I might not have been as comfortable with previously. I haven't started any new pieces (because when I'm not working, I'm sleeping, and when I'm not sleeping, I'm working), but I have plans to start something this weekend. And it will totally be Picasso inspired. :)

Overall, I am so thankful for the opportunity to have studied abroad and I will definitely be an advocate for anyone who asks.

Pompidou or Pompidont?

Yesterday was Wednesday. Realizing that my Paris trip was ending much too quickly, I set my alarm to get up earlier than need be so I could take a day trip back to Montmarte to see the Espace Dalí before I depart back to the US.

I first learned of Dalí in my high school Spanish classes - we had a print of "The Elephants" from 1948 hanging tin the back of the room. I have been slightly infatuated with that charming little mustached man ever since.

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It was a blast and a half. This time, I actually wished that it had been a larger museum. (but I suppose that it was okay, since I knew I would be going to the Pompidou Centre later the same day.)

I don't want to talk to much about his work because I truly think it would take me hours and hours and hours since each piece is different from the next in a multitude of ways. The one piece I want to highlight is the piece that Maddi and Carver noted in their presentation this past week: "The Lobster Phone". 

Is it a phone? Is it a lobster? Its up to you, you little artist, you.

  

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On to Pompidou! I was super excited to go to Pompidou because when I stayed in Maastricht last Friday the Dutch family I stayed with told me that it is a must see! :)

They were so right, this place was really, really interesting. Actually I feel like the perfect word to describe the place was pretty quirky. I liked it - in short.

The first piece to really catch my eye - you will understand in a minute why it is so eye catching - was a portrait of a young, tuberculus prostitute named Yvette. This piece, titled: "Yvette ou la robe à carreaux" by Auguste Elysée Chabaud was completed from 1907-1908. Here she is:

When I came across it on the 5th floor, I found myself staring into her raccoon-like eyes. It wasn't until the only other individual in the room with me, an older gentleman, mid-fifties, with graying hair covered by a strange green cap, gave me a couple weird looks that I realized that I was quite literally lol-ing. Whoops.

I really think that that is the reason that I really liked this piece. I think that there is power in being able to paint something that can evoke such a strong emotion in someone (in this case I just thought it was so laughably ludicrous). But nonetheless I loved it.

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This next piece is one from an artists we discussed earlier in class, František Kupka. It is titled: "Motif Hundou" from 1919. 

I didn't like this one because it made me laugh. It didn't make me laugh at all. I like this one because I absolutely love the idea of hombred color. I got my hair hombre-d back in the day, off the top of my head I can picture 3 hombre article of clothing I own, I have done several hombre paintings myself within the past couple of years, my curtain in my room back home is even hombre-d. I think I might have a problem. But really, I love the idea of colors fading into and blending into their background and other colors surrounding them, I find it incredibly interesting to look at and all around beautiful.

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The next piece I want to talk about is: "Bleu de Ciel" by Vassily Kandinsky, 1940. 

I had such a rush of emotions when viewing this piece. (Tyler teased me later for how long I stared at this one). It just was really, really reminded of my kids. Well, not MY kids - I work at the university's child development center where I spend all of my time with 28  fun-sized 14-33 month old beebees that I care for as they were my own. I couldn't help but think that they would be absolutely just as mesmerized by this piece as I was. It contained these playful, fun, quirky little characters that just floated about. (I am noticing a trend in my preferences for art that I haven't ever before - if a piece can make me laugh, I will probably love it).

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The final piece that I am going to highlight is Gérard Ernest Schneider's "Peintre" from 1956.

I'm going to be straight up with you - I have this thing against the color green. It has to be the right shade and temperature for me to like it, and this green is NOT it. But nonetheless I will tell you what I DID like about this piece. But first, I'll start with a little anecdote about an unforgettable experience I had in ARTS 1102, the painting class I took last year. So one day, I walk into class and there is a chocolate cake with bright pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles all over it sitting by its lonely self in the middle of the studio. Resisting my temptation to finger the frosting when no one was looking, I set up my station and waited for my teacher to explain. She told us that that day, we would be testing out a new style of painting, painting with volume. What she wanted us to do was really be overly generous in the amount of paint we use, to build it up so that if we were to look at our painting from the side, we would be able to see it sticking off of the page. I tried really, really hard - but was pretty unsuccessful. (but I will try, try again!) Don't worry, the happy ending is that we got to eat the cake at then end of the class and it was delicious.

Back to "Peintre" - so this picture obviously doesn't do it any justice what-so-ever, but this painting was literally jumping off the canvas. I walked to see the it from the side and it was exactly what I was trying to capture that day in non-cake form. Although this shade of green does NOT at all tickle my fancy and I didn't get to eat cake after this piece, I really admire the style of painting, and I am hopeful that my next attempt will be half as successful as this.

Picasso was one weird fella

Everyone has heard of Pablo Picasso, the celebrated Spanish painter, oui? 

Well on Wednesday, I got to visit Musée Picasso, the art gallery that houses over 5,000 (that's right, 5K) pieces of his original work and a few pieces of work by other artists that are dedicated to him.

Musée Picasso was much, much smaller than the other museums we have been to thus far, which I really liked because I didn't feel too worn out by the end of it and was able to keep my attention span in check throughout. 

By far, my favorite museum so far.

I thought, psh, of course I know Picasso - he does all the crazy work with naked people sitting on armchairs. The ones where you can only tell that there is a face and a body and a chair after you've read the piece title. And that one painting with all the people and animals with strange deformed, floating, stretched out faces. ("Guernica") Yeah, psh, I know him.

I SO DID NOT KNOW PICASSO. 

His work was so much weirder than I was familiar with, which I thought was absolutely fabulous. Here are some of my favorites:

What surprised me the most about his work was the number of mediums he worked with as an artist. When our proffesor said that he personified about 40 different artists in just one lifetime, she was not kidding. I mean really he was a painter, a sculptor, a printmaker, a ceramicist, a stage designer, a poet, a playwright...and those are just categories! In his sculptures he used sheet metal, wire, mesh, string, wood, tree branch, nails, bronze, plywood, screws, etc. In his "paintings" he used oils, pastels, inks, sand, acrylic, pencil, crayon, charcoal, etching, pressed cork, water-based paints, etc. 
I mean come on, that is amazing, and how fun!

Today I Fell in Love with a Painting

Today we went to Musée d'Orsay, right in the heart of Paris on La Seine. Both Georgia and our Accent trip advisor, Adrienne, said that this was their favorite museum - even better than the Louvre, so I was excited to experience it myself.
It was much more modern than any of the other museums that we have been to thus far. I found that to be very interesting and quite refreshing.

After having visited more museums in the past seven days than I have in my whole 21 years of existance, I am becoming more and more familiar with different artist's painting styles and specific works. I was surprised by my ability to see a painting from a distance and think, "oh that looks like a Renoir..". I barely knew who Renoir was last week and now I can sniff one out from a mile away.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 ("La Pont des Arts, Paris")

 1867 - 1868

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One piece that I was already familiar with before seeing it at the Musée d'Orsay was Claude Monet's "Coquelicots" aka "Poppy Fields" from 1873. This picture was not at all as large as I was expecting it to be. The first museum we visited, what feels like a thousand years ago but was really only last Tuesday (wow), featured many Monet pieces that were on the larger end. Most of the Monet's I saw today were smaller and more detailed. And I LOVED them. This particular one I loved for the very reason that just this past Saturday, I took a nap in what just might have been this EXACT poppy field. The EXACT place where Monet painted his wife, Camille, and his son Jean. Thinking about this makes me feel so enlightened and tranquil. 

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Another piece we had talked about in class so I was already familiar with was Gustave Caillebotte's "Raboteurs de Parquet" or "Floor Scrapers" from 1875. This piece our professor briefly talked about in our lecture earlier this morning. Trying not to give too much away, she instructed us to note the amount of attention to detail that Caillebotte puts into this piece. She mentioned also  that this piece was actually rejected by France's most reputable art exhibition, the Salon, because it is a depiction of the working-class in their everyday lives - a subject matter that was disparaged in this time period. I think, however, that it is beautiful. It is much too hard to see in the picture, but the myriad, pint-sized features that detail and enhance this piece are enough to keep you entertained for hours. The man in the middle is wearing a gold ring on his left ring finger. The curls of the floor scraps seem to have texture. A glass of red wine sits near the right hand border. The two men on the right appear to be engaged in a conversation. The list is endless.

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But today, like mentioned in the title of this post, I fell in love.

I was walking through the impressionist exhibit of the museum when a piece caught my eye for a reason I will inform you of shortly. It was painted in 1884 by an artist we have never mentioned before in class, and that I have never even heard of: Johan Barthold Jongkind. This piece was titled simply, "La Seine". 

Here's why its special to me: 
*And this is a fair warning that I am actually going to get a little sappy right now, which for anyone that knows me knows that this is an extreme rarity. Very, very, rare.

On May 22nd, 2015, a group of strangers and I arrived in Paris, France. 

On May 23rd, 2015, two of these strangers and I decided to pick up some Indian take out & a bottle of cheap wine, and explore a small part of this unfamiliar city. We found ourselves sitting under a bridge next to La Seine eating this amazingly delicious food, drinking wine out of cheap plastic cups, watching boats drift by, listening to children yelling things in French (that I didn't understand one word of), and talking about life and school and boys.

Then we heard ringing. It was the bells of the Notre Dame, not very far off in the distance. 

A week and a half later, none of these people are strangers and I already have I list of memories that I will hold with me forever.

This painting is a depiction from over 130 years ago, but it is exactly how I picture that night. 
                                It was perfect.

Finding a Paintbrush in a Field of Poppies

Saturday we got on a bus at 08:54 to set our for Giverny, about an hour from where we are staying in Paris. While in and out of sleep, Prof. Zabala told of of the life of Claude Monet, one of the world's most famous impressionism painters. 

Here's the brief version of his personal life. Trust me, it is way more interesting than Keeping Up with the Kardashian's or any of that asinine trash (sorry about it). So here we go, for a good portion of his life, Monet lived his life in great poverty. Against his parent's wishes, he married Camille Doncieux, a French model of Monet's that was even poorer than himself. 

In the years following their marriage, Claude and Camille had two sons, Jean and Michel. I'm going to skip to the interesting part now. So after a while of trying to sell his work, Monet met Ernest & Alice Hoschedé, wealthy department store owners, who began to commission him for his paintings. Alice ended up become his mistress (which is unfortunately not at all surprising). 
So somewhere down the road, something went terribly wrong and Hoschedé went bankrupt and could no longer afford to support Monet. This is where is gets amusingly strange. As the Hoschedé family was now very poor, Monet offered to let Alice and her children live with him, Camille, and their two sons. Yeah, not at all weird having your wife and kids plus your mistress and her kids all in the same house. And oh, this is where I should probably mention that Alice and Ernest had SIX children together. SIX. So now in the Monet household there were TWELVE mouths to feed...super smart considering that Monet's biggest supporter was now bankrupt. Anyway, things ended up working out strangely well for this almost polygamous household. I mean, not well - Camille ended up dying of cervical cancer while also having tuberculosis, but they were able to get along (from what I heard) and make ends meet. That's pretty much it, but amiright that this is way better than reality TV?

Side note: an even weirder family relationship fact about the Monet-Hoschedé household was that one of Alice and Ernest's daughters (so Monet's step-daughter) ended up marrying his son Jean. Not weird at all.

Anyway I should probably talk about Monet's art. Monet, unlike many of his competitors in that era, preferred to paint while in nature compared to while in the traditional studio setting. After the death of Camille and marriage to Alice, Monet ended up coming into a LOT of money from his paintings. He was able to move his huge family into an adorable little house in Giverny, where he began to create a great, great, great masterpiece: his garden. This became the basis for a vast number of his most famous paintings including his water lily collection, Nymphéas, The Japanese Footbridge, and more.

Now, years after his passing, his house and his garden have both been completely maintained. It became a museum opened to public visit in 1980. It is basically the most beautiful place on the entire planet. Enough talk, here are the pictures.

 Oh and one thing that's kind of interesting is Monet was obsessed with Japanese art. I didn't take any pictures of this, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it. But seriously its all over his house.