Sketches

I have a scanner, and it is a magical thing. My cousin Eric gave me a super machine: printer,copier and scanner all in one. And it's compact, too! I have been approaching the machine tentatively, figuring out one feature at a time.
So I scanned sketches. I remember loving to leaf through my friend J's sketch book, seeing what was new as well as revisiting old-time favorites. We were in 7th, 8th, 9th grade, and she was good. She was extremely talented. I felt lucky to see her process, to have access to the beginnings of her creative journey. I loved those sketchbooks so much.
 J and I lost touch since. We're still friends, but from afar and on occasion. She's still (thank God!) an artist, and I'm sure that she has filled her fair share of sketch books since high school. Lucky are those who browse through them.
J's talent was unquestionable at the time, and I knew that my creative strenghts lay elsewhere, in writing and theatre. But nonetheless, her sketchbooks inspired me deeply, and I have since kept the habit of sketching. Not all that often, sometimes so badly I have to throw the paper in the trash out of sheer shame, but frequently enough to have a sketchbook I can leaf through.
So here are a few.I'll give little explanations along the way, because I'm a writer and I can't help associating those images with words, memories and sometimes stories.

Jimi Hendrix -From Electric Ladyland album photograpy. I was listening to the album on the beat-up cd player in the Henn House, Fillmore Street, Bethlehem. It was my first year of apprenticeship at Touchstone. No internet to distract me, possibly Lehigh students screaming in the background. Zach in or out, Michael cooking. 



Ray Lamontagne, Till the Sun Turns Black album cover. Probably drawn the same night. I had just discovered Ray Lamontagne's music after having heard a lot about him. One of the first second hand cd's I ever bought on amazon. 

These were characters I wanted to write: Claire et Aurélien. But I felt the need to draw them instead. I wasn't basing my work on photos or previous drawings. But when I looked at what I had done, I realized these characters looked a bit like my French grandparents. Especially the man. Perhaps the similarities are only in my head. It doesn't really matter. 
                                                 

When John Updike died, they published a striking picture of him in the New York Times. It was all contrasts, very luminous and soulful. I tried to find that quality again in the drawing, but I made his face a bit too wide. 

Study of a hat, based on a real hat that I own (different color, but same shape). I was trying to understand volume, and wean myself out of drawing from pictures. 

Jacques Prévert, qui me toise - ce visage ancré sur la couverture de l'édition folio de Paroles. 

Ma grand-mère et une amie, à Kersiny, Bretagne. Je n'ai pas réussi à convier la perfection de la journée, le soleil éclatant, etc. Mais bon, il faut bien commencer quelquepart... 

Beautiful shadows

I am fascinated by puppetry. I always have, really. I vividly remember my 9th birthday spent on the plane ( journeying to the USA) when I opened my present on my folding table and it was a marionnette. I was thrilled.
For Christmas this year, I received a beautiful two sided nepalese marionnette representing the godesses of virginity and creation. And I made a whole set of shadow puppets for this year's Christmas City Follies at Touchstone. They ended up not being used, but they still exist and may make an appearance sonner than later. In fact, I am incorporating puppets for my Fresh Voices piece, and am turning to shadow puppetry.
I'm therefore sharing with you my two treasured  shadow sources. If anyone has more inspirational sources to share, please do!

 Michel Ocelot's Princes et Princes et Princesses made a strong visual impression on me when I saw it in the cinema (as did Ocelot's animation film Kirikou et la Sorcière which is one of my favorite movies).

I just discovered the first full-lenght animation film in History - Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Mesmerizing cinematography, and poetry with every frame.

Warhol portraits: the glory of superficiality

I'm about to leave to go the library, but I felt like writing a little entry about the Andy Warhol exhibit I went to see at the Grand Palais a few days ago.
"Non-plussed" is the word that comes to mind. I was uninterested in those portraits, uninterested in the sleekness of the faces, the lack of imperfections. And I was almost angry to see such craftsmanship wasted on superficiality. When Warhol says he's a commercial artist, I respect that. But he seems to use that tag of "commercial artist" to prevent himself from questionning his own talent and artistry.
The few paintings I almost enjoyed were the imperfect ones, the ones where something apart from the faces appeared. But that didn't happen often. And, ironically, I was much more touched by the polaroid pictures that were taken to create the paintings, because they were at least raw and real.
As I was walking from room to room, I couldn't help thinking about Richard Avedon, and the way he caught a form of truth in his portraits of the rich and beautiful people. Something that went beyond the glitter and the makeup. He also claimed his right as an artist to be commercial, and didn't apologize about it. But he nevertheless chose to delve deep into the art of photography and consider the people posing in front of him as people and not icons or objects representing modern times. Perhaps that's the way we need to read Warhol's art: a conservation of the iconic in the people he portrayed. A trace of the inhuman, the purely plastic side of humanity. Perhaps, but that is so utterly opposite to my understanding of humanity that I'm not able to understand Warhol's entreprise. There's got to be some form of compassion in a painting or in any form of art in order to be engaged with the work on a deeper level. No?

For an overview of the exhibit, see here:

http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/portfolio/2009/03/13/andy-warhol-s-installe-au-grand-palais_1167765_3246.html


And, to prove my point about Warhol and Avedon, here are both artist's depictions of a modern icon, Marilyn Monroe: (And I have to say, Warhol's Marilyn series was one of my favourites in the exhibit, because it was a fresh take on fame, but his 1980's portraits are so mecanical that the brilliance of his method is not enough to sustain the viewer and to refrain him/her from being bored and unengaged)


Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967


Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, New York city, May 6, 1957.

Paris, unassumingly

I'm sitting in my little room, half-listening to an old man talk about philosophy on the France culture radio station: ..."qui se définit par la défaite des cultures hérétiques en Occident"... A little dense for the morning, but the voice in itself is a form of music, or at least - human presence. I quite like it when I can have the radio on and zone in and out of it.

I went to a very interesting photo exhibit with Nathalie yesterday at the Fondation Cartier (extremely cool building by the way, conceived by the architect Jean Nouvel, same one who made the Musée du Quai Branly). William Eggleston is a (famous, apparently) american photographer who casts a modern and unassuming eye on Paris. That's what makes his photos so refreshing. No unecessary prettiness, but glances of what makes Paris alive with a pretty incredible use of colour.

In his own words : "I approached it (Paris) and am still approaching it as if it is just anywhere". What a great idea! Everyone should do that, instead of refer to Paris with that sickly reverence usually reserved for the dead or the almost dying.

His technique is basically "point and shoot", and he only takes one shot of each subject. So, if he missed the moment, then it's gone. You can feel that energy in his photos, especially when people are within the shot. A working black man repairing the pavement, and looking straight at the camera with a shovel in his hand, and right behind him, his colleague, also looking straight out and pointing. This very narrow perspective is created and forces us to see these people. Quite provocative, in fact. Too bad there weren't more people shots. Many still lives, some very smart and cleverly composed, tending towards abstraction. Others, glimpses of beauty in unexpected places, like the one with the green light reflected on the wet pavement.

I should probalbly also mention his paintings, or graphic work exhibited which would also be commonly referred to as "doodles" if anyone else were making them. At first, I honestly was shocked that they would exhibit doodles from anyone in a museum. But then, when looking at the frames that combined the doodles with a photograph, I changed my mind. Both mediums completed each other, since they were reactions to reality, each in their own way. The photo: an immediate reaction, point and shoot, and the doodle (I really should call it a drawing): a delayed reaction based on the photograph. Kind of cool.

I'm happy I went to see this exhibit (pure luck, it was Nat's idea), because it also tells me that people - artists - want to picture Paris in other ways than the everlasting cliché served to us all the time. They want to desacralise it, make into a stranger that can be discovered all over again.

I'm still trying to figure out where I stand about this city. I still can't figure out if I like it or if I don't. It might sound silly, but this is my home town we're talking about, which also happens to be one of the most popular places on earth. So, the question is, can I not like Paris? Very conflicting relationship.

Somewhere in a notebook, I wrote this, which still applies: "When I came back to Censier, I decided to get some bread, and as I was waiting to cross the road, I looked up at one of the buildings in front of me and there came a feeling of peace, in the sense that at that precise moment, I wasn't fighting with Paris. It was my city, and I liked it."

PS: informative review of the exhibit in the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/05/william-eggleston