Chestnuts in Blossom

Reine Mathilde  Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/panel  12 x 12"  30 x 30 cm  

​Tables under the Trees  Laurie Fox Pessemier  Acrylic/linen 14 x 10.5  35 x 27 cm  

​​The Repair Shop, Seattle 1996  murals 6 x 14 feet:  1.8 x 4.2 meters  1996

Blossom Laurie Fox Pessemier  Acrylic/wood  20 x 7"  50 x 18cm 

ARTNOTES:  CHESTNUTS IN BLOSSOM

​There's been a flurry of activity this past week, in addition to packing up the move to sunny Italy.  

We went to the Giotto to Caravaggio show at the Jacquemart Andre Museum.  The museum is an unusual place -- while Americans were buying the French Impressionists, the Andres were buying Italian Renaissance classics, and left their house and its collection to France.   The house is over the top wonderful -- an oasis in a busy city, with an elegant garden behind.   Their collection is wonderful -- including a Tiepolo fresco painstakingly moved from Venice.

What better location for a Giotto to Caravaggio Exhibition?  The show is beautifully curated, and includes works by Piero della Francesco and Massacio.  The Caravaggios glow with luminescence (he experimented with adding fireflies to his sketches).  Giotto represents the very start of the Renaissance and Caravaggio the beginnings of the Baroque period -- and we see the portrait change as time moves on.  

It was a welcome break from the endless sorting of our belongings -- we have literally hundreds of paintings. Depite destroying many, we have at least 300 we will move to Rocca Malatina.  We return to Paris in June for a show at 102, rue Cherche Midi, where we had an expo in 2014.   This show will run from 24 June until 4 July.   We hop on the plane on the 6 July USA-bound for a show at Figure 8 Island in North Carolina, mid month.  Hopefully we will sell lots of our paintings in both places.

Packing up, I found pair of shoes I thought I'd lost in America in 2010; a plaid silk dress Blair gave me for Easter in 1983; photos of a mural we executed at my friend Sal's Volvo repair shop in 1996 (Tiepolo it ain't).  

We don't need to move any furniture at all because our new abode is completely furnished a la 1910, the year of the building.   But it isn't easy to find homes for what we have -- it may end up on the street in July.  Meanwhile, a friend took our olive and our azalea trees.  

I had a painting workshop with a wonderful woman from New Orleans, studying political science in Scotland.  We sat in the Luxembourg Gardens, under the chestnuts in blossom, enjoying April in Paris.