De Giverny a Paris

I'm sorry it's been so long. I've had a crazy few weeks, and it's very easy to get so caught up in what I'm doing here that I lack the time to actually reflect on it, but I have a few minutes now, so here goes...

I'm not sure how I can possibly capture what really happened 3 weeks ago in Giverny. We had been working out in the landscape by Mont Sainte Victoire, in Cezanne country, for about a month, and I had made all the progress I could out there. I was starting to understand shape, color, light, line, movement, all these artistic terms, but I had yet to really figure out how they relate to each other. My work in this period is full of empty white spaces between colors, and lots of yellow. Things were starting to make sense, but not really clicking, and I was getting frustrated. Then, on a friday afternoon, we got on a bus and headed down to the TGV station. The train ride from Aix to Paris was exceptional. I'm not sure whether we took the western rout up through Bordeaux, or the eastern one up by Lyon (I think it was the latter), but we passed first by Mont Sainte Victiore, then by Mont Ventoux, we rocketed by many hillside towns in the foothills of what may or may not have been the Alps, and then hit a flat plain. this is where the colors started getting good. As we got further and further north, the reds, yellows, and oranges started coming out. Then, all of a sudden we were in the middle of Paris, at Gare de Lyon. We took a hectic Metro ride from there to Gare du Nord, and got on a train out to Giverny, where Monet spent his later years. This whole time, nobody ever looked at our tickets, because, as to be expected in France, the train workers were on strike.

When we got out to Giverny, we walked into a dream world. There is a foundation in Giverny that owns a whole bunch of property right across from a museum (the foundation actually owns the museum, formerly dedicated to American art in France, now on loan to the French government), and just down the road from Monet's Gardens. The foundation exists for artists to come and stay, sometimes in residences, sometimes for week long seminars like ours. We were provided food by the museum cafe, and we each had our own room in a compound that included several houses and extensive gardens. Every day we went out painting or drawing as we pleased. We had a visit to Monet's house, to see his gardens as a group (although we could go back whenever we wanted) and to look at Monet's incredible collection of Japanese prints. I spent the first day or two working in watercolor, and the rest of the time in oil.

Giverny is a tough place to work, because the whole darn town looks like a Monet painting. Yet despite that I did my best to render what I saw, as I saw it, with as little regard to Monet as possible. The water colors are something I credit with the breakthrough I was to have. I was able to break through from one color into another, in a way I wasn't letting myself do with the oils, and, over the course of the week, I was even able to create a painting I'm still proud of. The watercolors themselves aren't much to look at, but they were invaluable in allowing myself to make something that is.

When the week came to a close, three of us went up, inspired by our time in Arles, to look at some Van Gogh in Amsterdam. I really didn't like that city. The architecture all seemed fake to me, with facades built to make every house look like it was facing the opposite direction that it was, trams that ding loudly at all hours, and don't stop for anything, despite running on the sidewalks, and thousands upon thousands of bikes. The canals were beautiful, but we found refuge from the annoying street life in the Van Gogh and Rijks Museums, where we saw about half of Van Gogh's lifetime masterpieces, and Rembrandt after Rembrandt after Rembrandt, and the coffee shops, where we enjoyed elephants, mangos, and amnesia haze.

Oh, and did I mention, we went there without our passports (we forgot them in Aix) and almost got arrested by the Dutch customs officer? Yeah, not a great trip.

Then we returned for a weekend in Aix, before ten intense days of still lives. Fast forward until this past Wednesday. We, once again, board the TGV to Paris, only this time to stay in Paris for a week of intense looking at art. We posted up in a hostel in the 4th, about a block and a half away from the magnificent Parisian city hall. After leaving our bags in our rooms, we headed down to the Grand Palais for a retrospective of late Renoir paintings. As this was not an "official visit," we were free to peruse the exhibit on our own for a few hours, before hopping back on the metro for our first lack luster meal at the hostel.

The next day began our series of seminars. We started off at the Louvre, warming up our eyes on an exhibition of Titien and Tintoretto, along with other Venician renaissance artists, then we got down to business. We, all 12 of us (professors included) sat down in front of two paintings, the first people aren't quite sure whether it's a Titien or a Georgioni, of two Venicians playing music and two muses, and the second was Rembrandt's painting of Bathsheba reading a letter. We looked at each painting for about an hour and a half to two hours, looking, and talking. Needless to say it was exhausting. The second day we were split up into groups, according to who was in the art history class I'm taking. My group looked first at a Chardin painting, and then at a Goya portrait. In the afternoon we went over to the Musée d'Orsay (in my opinion the best museum in the world) and had a look at some Pissaro, some Monet, some Sisley, and a Van Gogh, to compare styles and touches. The third day, we returned to the d'Orsay to have a more concentrated look at a Cezanne still life as compared to Monet's portrait of his first wife, Camille, as she lay dying. Camille on her death bed was among the most heartbreaking things I've ever experienced. Then, in the afternoon, we went over to the Orangerie, to have a 3 or 4 hour look at Monet's memorial to the fallen soldiers of WWI. Wow. The final day, we spent at the Musée Granet, a smaller museum, looking first at some expressionists, and then some more at Monet. We saw, but did not spend much time with, the painting that gave the Impressionist movement it's name, Impression Soleil Levant, but we looked more carefully at two Monet landscapes, an early one and a late one, to see how far he went, and then we sat in front of a large study of his lilly pads that he did, probably from the motif (as opposed to in his studio) in preparation for his more monumental work for the Orangerie.

I have to take the time, here, to explain that, while the majority of the works we looked at were impressionist, this was not the focus of the discussions. The school is teaching me a lot about vision, and how one's vision relates the the world he or she sees. It's easier to really get at this in front of an impressionist piece. The school is, in no way, trying to tell me that Monet is in any way better than Goya, or even Titien, who paint much more according to Salon styles. We looked at some pretty weak Monets and Cezannes. They are, however, helping me see why Monet, Cezanne, and the rest of the impressionists, in addition to people like Goya and Titien, consistently produced stronger paintings than someone like David (the french neo-classicist), whose paintings border on not even really being art. This is something I'm looking forward to discussing with each of you over a meal at some point.

I'm beginning to feel like I've taken up enough of your time. But I hope you can see that I've been really busy. I'm doing some exciting stuff over here in France. I can't wait to bring it back to share with you all. If you ever want to go to a museum, let me know.