Reflection Tangier Cafe Blair Pessemier Acrylic/linen 32 x 46" 81 x 116cm
aster Flowers Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/linen 16 x 11 41 x 27cm
Reflections Murano Blair Pessemier Acrylic/linen 23.5 x 32" 60 x 81cm
Artnotes: Coming Back
The trouble
with going to faraway places is coming back.
At first, there’s the rush of familiarity, home, relaxation, but then
the bitter reality of rain, traffic and noise: the everyday.
Don’t get
me wrong. I love my dog, my sunny yellow
apartment (albeit small), the fabulous street market just below my window. But try as I might, I can’t see Paris with my
baby-eyes anymore.
I bought
over six kilos of meat from the butcher, on account of he knew I was going to
use the credit card, and Blair wasn’t there.
I haven’t got a good concept of metric weight, but when the rubber hit
the road, that shopping bag was awfully heavy.
I froze a mass of steaks and five coquelets (baby roosters), as well as
some veal. That left a giant amount of
veal remaining, so I brought out the old Petit Lux (we used to work there, when
we were babies-cooking-in-a-French restaurant) recipe for blanquette de veau,
and invited two visiting Americans to dinner.
We’ve had another meal, and four Harika dishes as well.
The dinner
guests brought a daffodil plant. Very
Easter-y. Which brings me to tomorrow
and brunch for seven of us. It’s really
all the apartment can hold, seeing as there are paintings piled half-a-dozen
deep all around the place. My six kilos
didn’t actually cover my plan for Easter, so I went back to the butcher and
bought four large pigeons. It’s brunch,
after all, and half a pigeon each should do the trick.
The
paintings are relenting, with sales up significantly this last week. A sale of twenty to North America, and 8 to
Central America. Our television spot
comes out in South America this month, and I have already had an inquiry for
lessons from an Argentinean. The
painting workshop is slower this year, as if the universe knows hauling fifty
pounds of supplies makes us tired.
The trees
are nursing young leaves in the park, and the beds are planted with brilliant
pink primroses. One of Harika’s best dog
friends died this week, moving her and Atlas, her closest dog friend, into more
senior spots in the pissing order. We
will miss Canaille, a mixed breed of 13 years.
Blair is
painting giant canvases since our return from Morocco. The dining room is the studio, and it
underscores one of the reasons we go away:
to have enough room to paint.
