Artnotes: Butterflies and Flowers

Blue Butterfly  Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/carton  7 x 8 inches  SOLD

 

 Blue  Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/wood  6.5 x 9 inches

 Moth on Yellow  Laurie Fox Pessmeier    Acrylic/wood  5 x 13 inches  SOLD

Flower/Giverny   Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/linen   10 x 16 inches

Artnotes:  Butterflies and Flowers

This week we went to Giverny in the morning.  No painting, just three women (think  Cakes and Ale) who wanted to sketch at Monet’s gardens and have lunch.   I hadn’t been there for some time at that hour, and the guards told us NO PAINTING.  We insisted we were not painting, but making sketches, no easels.  It worked out fine.  Our clients made lovely small watercolors by the lily pond.   This was our last scheduled trip to Giverny before it closes on 31 October.

It was a wildly foggy morning and the garden was chock full of spider webs bearing large beads of water.  They resembled Christmas decorations:  strings of glistening pearls all along the flowers and trees.  Thus inspired, Blair and I sketched greeting cards (minus the webs – too Halloween) to sell at the Christmas fair at the American Church on the 16 November.  

On Friday, we went to the opening of “Mundo Lingua”:  the museum of Language.  Our former gallery landlord, Mark, created this museum on his own.  You might recall Blair was painting the globe this summer:  by language, instead of by country.   It looked great mounted in a stand, with all the corresponding color/languages adjacent.

Blair and I have often toyed with the idea of having a museum – we’ve considered art, the tabletop, and sundry ideas.  We never did it.  Mark, on the other hand, took the bull by the horns and created this terrific tribute to the spoken and written word.

He has a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone displayed under glass in the main room.   There are interactive displays from sign language to aboriginal languages.    Downstairs, there is a language “tree”, showing  thousands of languages, branching one from another, green leaves carrying the name of the tongue.    I briefly watched “The Gods Must be Crazy” in his language theatre, next to a poster of [what else but] My Fair Lady.   

I imagine months, maybe years, of reflecting on this idea and then putting it into motion.   I was gobsmacked by Mark’s drive and ability, as much as I am by the museum.   It’s located at the corner of rue Servandoni and rue Canivet, near St. Sulpice, in the 6^th arrondissement, and is open from 10 to 6 every day.

This morning we went on a walk (Harika would call it a “forced march”) to the banks of the Seine.  What should we find there but a submarine sitting on top of a peniche?  The barge, called the Colporteur, carried a Jules-Verne-ish contraption, named the Axolotl,  of metal and portholes, featuring art inside as well as out.   We looked as much as we could, it being closed at 9 this morning.   We crossed back over the Pont Alexandre III where Harika stretched her legs out on the grass at Invalides.