AIX WORKSHOP

Posted on by
78

After a week in Paris we flew to Marseilles to meet up with the people on our workshop. It was great to catch up with friends from previous workshops and meet up with the new students. A coach took us to our luxury hotel, Le Piggonet, on the outside of the old town of Aix en Provence.

The hotel was a beautiful old building set in magnificent gardens. We could have happily spent a week painting in the gardens, but the town of Aix had a lot to offer so we split our painting time between the hotel and the town.


Le Piggonet


Hotel Gardens


Painting in the Hotel gardens


Dining at Le Piggonet


Flower markets Aix en Provence


Street Markets

We were introduced to some fantastic restaurants in the town. One of our students lived in the country side not far from Aix and had a great knowledge of all the best restaurants. This was one of our favorites – Le Patio, a small family run restaurant with a great atmosphere, good service and fantastic food.

The little town of St. Remy is not far from Aix en Provence. We spent a day there, painting and visiting the Asylum Van Gogh spent time in. We were privileged to paint in the garden of the asylum, where Van Gogh would have often sat and sketched.

Although the asylum surroundings were idealic, life inside must have been horrific. These bath tubs were filled with cold water into which troublesome inmates were immersed and trapped under these wooden boards.

In the town of St. Remy, the main square provided a quiet, spacious area surrounded by ancient stone walls and wooden shutters. We spent an enjoyable afternoon painting there before heading back to our hotel for drinks under the plane trees.

Blue Shutters – St. Remy

Cassis is a small fishing town on the Mediterranean coast not far from Aix. The busy harbour and backdrop of old buildings made a great painting subject. We shared the park across the harbour with the local boules players, cigarette smokers and baguette eaters. Under the shade of a grove of casuarina trees, we painted the changing vista of the harbour.

Cassis Waterfront

Paul Cezanne lived and painted in Aix en Provence. His house and studio have been made into a museum, crammed with his old coats, umbrellas, paint boxes, skulls, bones and still life props that feature in his paintings.

Cezanne had the house built to his design – living area downstairs, large studio upstairs.

The studio ceiling is about 5 metres high and the Northern wall, almost completely glass. The walls are painted a mid tone, neutral gray and there is a 4 meter x .5 meter corner hatch to remove large works from the studio. It’s a fantastic studio, unfortunately no photographs are allowed inside. Below is the front door to the house.

OVER AFGHANISTAN

Posted on by
12

On our way to Europe we were lucky enough to fly directly over Afghanistan just as the sun was setting. The flight information screen put us half way between Kandahar and Kabul at 30,000 feet. The country was amazing – incredibly rugged with very little vegetation except for a few cropped and settled river valleys.

A military transport plane crossed under us at about four o’clock and, within a few seconds, disappeared out of sight. A cold reminder that, down among the cracks and crevasses of this beautiful landscape, a war is going on.

HUNTING MUSEUM PARIS

Posted on by
Reply
62, rue des Archives, Paris

The Hunting Museum in Paris (Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature) is a fantastic mixture of artifacts and art work relating to the killing, eating, stuffing and preserving of animals.


There is an incredible collection of elaborately decorated and beautifully engineered devices for hunting animals, and a trophy room chock full of just about everything that moves (or used to move)


These beautifully made timber cabinets display various hunted animals – from a stuffed example to bones and droppings in tiny pull out draws. A number of slide out drawings and a video peep show visible through a pair of brass binoculars complete the display.


The glass storage cases for guns sit on top of numerous drawers crammed full of related hunting paraphernalia …


…even knives and forks for eating your kill.


Unlucky rabbit


Even unluckier Fox


Handsomely stuffed leopards


Hunting dogs and Wolf


Stuffed fox still looks cautious


Stuffed hunting dog with poorly fitted false teeth

Heavy duty iron hunting dog collar.

The Museum is housed in a beautiful 17th century building renovated and decorated without compromise. The more you look the more magnificent detail you will find.

FRENCH TRANSPORT

Posted on by
10

The French are responsible for some cool and quirky cars – Peugeot, Renault and Citroen make up the bulk of cars on the road but, mixed with these is an interesting collection of other brands clogging the Rues and Boulevards. Here are a few that caught my eye.

Citroen 2CV – these cars pitch and roll so much that it is said you can tell their owners by their grazed elbows

Weird amphibious convertible on a Paris river barge

Practical Plastic Citroen

Minute Ute


American extravagance in Paris


American muscle in Paris


British practicality in Paris


1960’s weirdness


Ancient  German engineering reborn


Tiny garbage truck at Versailles


Primitive 2CV

If you own a small white van in Paris and don’t have a garage, graffiti seems inevitable…

PARIS

Posted on by
16

We arrived in Paris with a week to explore the city before our workshop starts in Aix en Provence. Our apartment in Montmartre is great – close to some great bars and cafes, and just down the hill from Sacré Cœur.  A 6 day metro pass costs around 25 Euro and makes traveling around the city so easy – it is rare to wait more than a couple of minutes for a metro and the system is well signed and easy to follow – even for a pair of non French speaking Australians.


From a little bar at the top of Rue Tholoze – good beer and great view


Montmartre rooftops


Path to Sacré Cœur


Montmatre backstreets


At the top of Montmatre near Sacré Cœur is the busy tourist area where artists crowd the square and sell their wares.


Two people trying to walk past a crepe shop.


Rooftops from Sacré Cœur


Our apartment has a beautiful old oak floor and staircase. when you walk into the building you can smell the linseed oil someone lovingly rubs into it.


From our apartment window we look down on one of the busiest bars in Montmatre. I’m sure Picasso and Henry Miller and Alfred Jarry all drank here. Every night sees dozens of people spilling out onto the streets.


Sacré Cœur

The Romans lay claim to the arch, but I think the French must have invented the spiral staircase. We have been up and down so many in the last few days – thankfully Sacré Cœur has a clockwise one going up and an anti clockwise one coming down.


Spectacular views of Paris from the dome of Sacré Cœur


At night Sacré Cœur is a pretty scary sight.


Not near as scary as this strange grave in the Montmatre Cemetry…


…or the walls of bones lining the catacombs under the streets of Paris

The French are right up there with the Italians when it comes to decorative ornamentation

All through Paris are statues, ornamental gates, arches and fences and everywhere you look, beautifully decorated buildings. This all forms a backdrop to some of the most spectacularly presented humans on earth. The whole decoration thing went haywire back in the 1700’s and the Palace of Versailles  is a grand example of decorative excess. Unfortunately it was all carried out with tax payers money, bleeding the country into poverty, so the tax payers revolted and chopped off all the offending heads.


Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles 


Chapel, Palace of Versailles


The Palace of Versailles has amazing gardens covering 100’s of hectares. This is the view Louis XIV would have enjoyed as he sat to gaze out his window.


This would have been Louis’ bedroom – complete with everything except a flushing toilet

This room was used by Marie Antoinette when the disgruntled taxpayers came searching for her.

These elegant ladies in all their decorative finery were apparently riddled with nits and lice, had bad breath and didn’t smell too good, as it was believed at the time, that washing with water put germs into the pores of your skin causing nasty diseases.

This little abode was built to house the mistresses of the then rulers.


Busking with Tuba

How not to sell glasses

SWELL AGAIN

Posted on by
7

Every year as the weather here starts to warm up it means the Swell Sculpture festival is just around the corner. It’s a mighty thing – taking over the beach and beachfront parks, Sculptors from all over the country contribute. The works all relate to the sea and look fantastic in the beachside setting. They are all on display 24 hours a day, floodlit at night and changing through out the day as the sun shifts.

Currumbin Beach 9 – 18 September

MOMA NEW YORK

Posted on by
8

One of the most amazing places in New York is the Museum of Modern Art. It houses an incredible collection of 20th century art, carefully selected and beautifully displayed. These are a few of my favorites.

This painting of Morocco by Henri Matisse is pared down to simple abstracted elements, perfectly balanced and unified by contrasting black marks. The color arrangement is simple and compressed and the repeating circular shapes carry the eye around the painting, echoing the confusion of, what appears to be, mid day Morocco. This confused movement is balanced and directed by the stripes and grids. Notice how the diagonal stripes in the top left lead the eye back into the painting, as does the grid at bottom center. I love the scattered, repeating yellows and the way he has tied the big slab of pink  to the rest of the painting by carrying it through to smaller marks to the left.

Another painting by Matisse, again the subject is reduced to simple abstract marks, beautifully arranged to lead your eye up to the focal point of fishbowl and lemon. Matisse has halted the strong upward movement created by the tapering diagonals with the two white horizontal marks behind the fish bowl. The eye then wanders out to other carefully placed fragments of  repeating warm colors before being drawn back to the focal point. The only curved lines in the painting are also arranged to hold interest around the focal point, circling it  like a cloud or thought bubble, and contrasting with the hard geometric shapes in the rest of the painting.

In this painting called “The Piano Lesson” Matisse depicts his son being watched over by his piano teacher as he practices in front of an open window. The scene is lit by candle light so Matisse has used a number of large grey shadow shapes to separate and intensify the muted colors. The color arrangement again is kept very simple – warm shapes concentrated at the bottom, being led down to by a stripe of pale warm orange. Matisse has placed this stripe of orange alongside it’s complimentary blue. By matching the tonal values of the parallel stripes, Matisse has created a strange shimmering effect that almost hurts to look at. As you follow these stripes down to the head of his son, the sharp dark wedge over one eye seems to confirm the strange optical effect.

The following four images are of small collage paintings by Kurt Schwitters. Beautiful arrangements of colored paper, cardboard and printed matter – they have an aged, weathered look about them but still seem fresh and vibrant.

.

.

Robert Rauschenberg “Bed” At first glance this painting just looks like a heavily textured Abstract expressionist  painting, but after a few seconds the heavily painted support sneaks up and hits you. According to the accompanying notes the bed was Rauschenberg’s. You wonder what wild dreams he had beneath these covers.