Musee d'Orsay

I imagine this trip will leave me with something like a long-term hangover, not because I have been drinking too much (tho I have) but because... it's just all been so much. So much beauty, and emotional intensity, and disappointment, and joy, and sleep, and food, and walking, and company, and solitude. I get bored easily with regular life, but I am not sure I have to stamina for much of the alternative. Maybe 6 months of each will be about right, but at what point will flitting about Europe become boring too? Yes, too much exasperation with myself too....

As you know, I have been trying to see the museums before I go. This serves multiple purposes: 1) museums are inside, and it is impossibly cold outside, 2) museums are an important part of seeing Paris, 3) good art is inspiring. Despite all my talk of the impressionist being boring, I went to the Musee d'Orsay last week. They had this really cool exhibit about light and smoke and the flow of air. In many of the pieces smoke poured from above in a portrait box, an object, with a difference shape for each box, rotated and the viewer watched the way the smoke moved around the obstruction. This was fascinating, and the most interesting part was how the smoke moved after it had passed the obstruction. This could be a lesson for story telling. The most interesting part can be after, hours or centuries, a grave event has occured.

I read this amazing book (that Juliette recommended) called "behind the scenes at the museum" which used this idea, telling the story of 4 generations of women, and ultimately explaining why the ones in the present were the way they were based on this history, but not without deeply sympathetic treatment of the previous generations. I loved it.

At the museum, I took a break for the chocolat chaud and a pastry. Except they didn't have any pastry and they tried to get me to eat a muffin. This is not the first time the French have tried to get me to eat a muffin in France, and, unless I or someone I know made it, I absolutely refuse to eat muffins in France. I will not do it! The light was dark lavender so that you could hardly tell it was day and we sat behind a huge clock through which the gray light shown.

Back in the early 1990s at Hampshire College, my painting teacher was named Reilly. He was a stout hairy man who looked a little like a hobbit, wore Birkenstocks even in the dead of New England winter exposing his grissly toe nails (that I nearly offered to cut for him!) and always accompanied by a large dog who I loved but have forgotten the name of. While it turned out that I have no natural gift for painting, and not enough patiences with myself yet to get any better, he gently taught me a few interesting things and seeing and matter, and the one that has stuck with me most is the idea to vary your brush strokes in order to indicate depth of field.

Whenever I took at paintings now, I notice how or if the artist used brush strokes to communicate her image. The artists represented in the Orsay are some of the greatest painters to ever live. However, I only noticed Van Gogh and Sisley controling their brush strokes for depth of field. Another thing I love about Van Gogh is that, while you can clearly see the images he is sharing with you, each brush stroke also looks like a colored maggot, wiggling just slightly, but alive on the canvas.