Morning came and boy did I feel like crap! Not necessarily from the drinking from the night before, but I think my lack of sleep for the past two days, as well as all of the smoke I had to put up with the night before. There were only about 2 non-smokers at the party last night, and I was one of them. I always end up with a bad headache and a sore throat after a night like that. To be quite honest, I’m a little horrified that people still smoke, and hate when they try to make excuses about it. HUH?! It’s gross.
I’ve never been to France before. I like to pretend I’ve never been to Europe before. I was in Ireland once, where I spent the majority of the time at pubs. Given the fact that I didn’t touch alcohol at the time, it wasn’t a super time.
Anyhow, Marcelo has been here, a few times actually. So he decided we should just hit a section of town and take it from there. We grabbed some almond croissants on the way to the train station, and they were fantastic!! Is that cheese in there? I think it is!!
We quickly made our way over to the area where the Musée de L’Orangerie is. Getting onto street level from the station was pretty overwhelming!! The day before we were just in Dudu’s neighborhood, which isn’t too unlike any other city, but here it was different – GIGANTIC buildings, easily hundreds of years old, gardens, sculptures, monuments, a replica of that thing in front of the Paris Las Vegas hotel (im kidding), amazing clouds… Yeah!!
We went into the Musée de L’Orangerie, where there are two oval rooms with gigantic Monet paintings, lit only with natural light.
Underneath the main floor which is entirely dedicated to Monet, is many more galleries filled with other French artists… There are some things down here that I’ve seen many times… Cezannes, Renoirs, Picassos…. But I came across three artists that I’ve never heard of and REALLY enjoyed. One was an artist by the name of Maurice Utrillo who has really nice street scenes of Paris. The next artist that grabbed my eye was Chaime Soutine. He has some funky stuff!! His portraits remind me of Alberto Giacometti sculptures… He also did some still life’s of what looks like animals on the chopping block. Nice! It’s great coming to a museum and finding new artists that you love!!
The one that really was the most pleasant surprise was an artist by the name of Didier Paquignon.
First off, homeboy is still alive.
Secondly, WHOA!
I’m a photographer through and through, and I always thought my eye saw things differently than painters… While I can appreciate what painters can do, I never felt like I could connect fully with them and become an actual FAN of any of them… Illustrators are a different story. William Kentridge is just one example of someone whom I think is a pure genius!!! But I never had that relationship with any painters.
Anyhow, the first painting of Didier Paquignon that I saw was this one…. It was the first painting as I entered the part of the gallery that was entirely his exhibition. I guess what caught my eye first was his use of colors, secondly his content. It was the initial “what the hell IS that” followed by the “oh my god thats so cool.” (not my photo)
I glanced in and was delighted to see photo-realistic pieces… And even more delighted when they revealed themselves as paintings once I got closer!
His use of color really is fantastic. I don’t want to say he “has the eye of a photographer”, but his pieces show a certain attention to elements that painters don’t usually have, in my humblest of opinions. He had a couple of building sides that he had clearly done during “magic hour”, that very special time of day, either at sunset or sunrise, where light just makes everything look delicious. He had pieces where a building was half basking in delicious light, half cast in shadow. It’s the things I delight in seeing as I walk through cities, and this may be the first time I’ve seen an artist (not a photographer) do it. Here are a few more paintings of his from the exhibit that I loved. (these ARE my photos)
That last painting was one of my favorites. He did a whole series with this pod-like structure, and I completely fell in love with them. Instead of looking at paintings and being ushered back hundreds of years to a time where it was okay for women to have bellies and for artists not to know how to paint children, here I was seeing something almost Sci-Fi, throwing me forward in time, imagining our world in maybe 100 years, looking forward and being forced to imagine, because it hasn’t happened yet, as opposed to looking upon the paintings and seeing “what once was…” I don’t know… It was just a nice change I suppose.
After the museum, we walked along the gardens until we got to the Promenade area where we were going to grab a quick lunch. I did my best to convince Marcelo to go on the ferris wheel with me, but he promised later. Hear that? He promised!!! Let’s see if we do it or not… :b
For lunch we went to Angelina’s which boasts about having the world’s best hot chocolate. I went with a smoked salmon salad first which had… a WHOLE AVOCADO! YEAH! You know I’ve never even had an avocado until went to California? Crazy.
Afterwards, we split a Mont Blanc which is a dessert that they are also famous for, as well as the hot chocolate.
The Mont Blanc was… incredible. It showed up on the table, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The outside was a chestnut paste, the bottom of it was meringue, and the inside was whipped deliciousness. We went through that in about 60 seconds tops, then waited around for the hot chocolate… It came out in a gigantic pitcher, with a bowl full of hand whipped cream on the side, un-sweetened. This hot chocolate is pretty excellent… It’s SUPER thick, and really, it is high quality chocolate melted that you’re drinking. Not watered down or diluted with anything. It was incredibly rich however, (which I never thought I’d say) and we only had a little bit each. The other desserts they had looked pretty spectacular also.
After lunch, we walked along the banks of the Seine River towards Notre Dame… They do this funky thing in Paris… They put up scaffolding on buildings, yet COVER IT UP… I guess appearances really *ARE* everything here. It’s funny to me that even something like scaffolding, which is usually a sign of improvement, is still hidden. They hang vinyl coverings that mock the design of the building over the construction sites… Some people might say, “SUPER!”. I say, waste of resources! It’s just scaffolding! It’s temporary! Instead of spending all of that money getting your vinyl printout and all of the time hanging it, put that money and handy work toward finishing the job in the first place and getting the scaffolding down!
So Notre Dame… I guess they cleaned it recently? The front of the building is… REALLY clean! The back of it, not yet. :) I prefer the back of it!
Anyhow, there are lines everywhere to go anywhere. There were two lines to get into Notre Dame, one moving REALLY quick, the other not. We went to the quick line which got us in… The long one takes us up to the top. Wha!! I wanna do that! But there was no time. So we just went inside… Which is still incredibly impressive! The masonry, the stained glass, the hip 1970′s altar… This place was incredible… It was ENORMOUS. Really noisy though which was weird to me. Dot asked me to light a candle, so I did just that. In the second image, it’s the one in the front. Some of the sculptures in there were pretty creepy, giant skeleton over the casket of some dying saint… crazy!
The exterior of Notre Dame is pretty impressive, the sides and the back being FAR more interesting than the front. There are gargoyles all over this place! Each has a different creepy face, some missing heads altogether. I wish I had a better zoom lens with me, I could spend a whole 4GB CF card just shooting them. And yo, who is that guy holding his own head?!
After the museum, we hit up some crepes/ham and cheese sandwiches, caught the train home, chilled out, and had some tajine for dinner… AMAZING tajine.
That’s it! The Louvre tomrorrow, maybe a ferris wheel!
