Drawing the lines

-




For the last several weeks we have lived on Montmartre and when we have walked the streets, we have actually walked in the footsteps of Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Picasso.

Even though the most prolific painters on present-day Montmartre are the ones hitting on visitors coming to  the infamous tourist trap Place du Tertre, Rita has found inspiration in this 150-year-old artist community and taken up the water coloring she used to do a lot in her youth

Last night, she even went to a live model drawing class in the basement of one of our local dive bars, and before going, she was pretty worried,  that she  would be the most inexperienced in the class:


The last time I made drawings of live models was more than thirty years ago, and I felt completely rusty, but it turned out the participants in this class were at all different levels and I actually did some work that I dared show to the others.

Our model was a beautiful, slim Bulgarian girl with a lot of curly hair.

She was very good at posing during the usual two-minute and ten-minute sessions, but she was pretty difficult to draw because of her slender figure.


When the class was finished, all 16 of us had a coffee, and after some intense hours of drawing, without any chatting, it was interesting to finally talk and meet-up

 The people sitting next to me were from the US and Australia.

It was interesting to hear their stories.

The American woman came to Paris with a friend. She was supposed to spend a month in France but decided to stay on. She gave her Airbnb host an offer of renting the place and found herself an IT job on the staff of the future president Macron. 

She is still in Paris now seven years later.

The Australian guy has a small 'pied a Terre' in Paris and comes almost every year. He is a very good draftsman.

We chatted for several hours around the coffee tables in the café - in French, English, and Polish, as the afternoon turned into the early evening.


How Rita met up with all these people?

Actually, there is an app called MeetUp, which is a wonderful way for expatriates and digital nomads to participate in all kinds of different activities in their newfound, chosen cities.

Here you find offers of sports, cultural events, lectures, etc, and many are completely free.

We have been to gallery walks and to a wonderful full moon picnic party, where about 30 or 40 people shared their food and wine on the Pont des Arts, while watching an orange full moon rise above  Ile de la Cite



Here I fell into conversation with a guy, who, it turned out, has actually invented his own sport.  

He literally dreamed it up!

One night he dreamed he was skiing down a slope in the Rockies while playing Frisbee, and now you can follow the sport - amply named Ski Frisbee -  on Youtube (https://youtu.be/oPuswOHl29s )

The guy (his friends call him Captain Bob) lives on a houseboat further up the Seine and next to his boat, he has a guest houseboat, where Rita and I are now invited to stay for a week or two 

Whauv! What an offer!

Living on a houseboat will be a dream come true, and as the heat is still on in Paris: It will be lovely to be able to start each day with a cool dip in the Seine!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Night under the full moon: A unique Parisian gathering

-
Image
  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met, when we, a couple of years ago, stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. He arranges these casual parties at the middle of the Pont des Arts and he has done so, come rain or come moonshine, every month for the last many years. As I approached the iconic bridge, now mercifully devoid of its plague of "love locks," I was greeted by a cacophony of excited chatter in a United Nations potpourri of accents.  French people as well as expats from many corners of the globe mingled freely, their laughter and chatter forming a symphony of human connection that was actually quite infectious. As I accepted a glass of wine from a beaming Spanish astrophysics student, I pondered the curious phenomenon before me.  Here we were, a motley crew of strangers, united by nothing more than our shared presence in this city and our willingness to gaze skyward toge...
Read more

Stumbling into serenity: The secret garden of Saint-Serge

-
Image
The other day I walked the streets of the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and here, on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon what seemed like a portal opening into another time. Entering through an unassuming gate, and going down a narrow,  semi-private alley, I was transported from the frenetic present into a hidden,  quiet garden that turned out to be the garden of the  Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.    Photo: SortirAParis Before me unfolded a scene that could have been plucked from a 19th-century Russian novel: Long-bearded orthodox priests wearing flowing black robes and cylindrical kamilávka hats, moved unhurriedly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly parishioners sat in the garden, on rickety chairs, chatting in a melodic blend of Russian and  French. The abrupt transition from bustling street to  tranquil sanctuary was so jarring that I half-expected to find my smartphone transfor...
Read more

Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

-
Image
Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection.  Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.   A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings. Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it. During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumble...
Read more