As I write this newsletter, the European Union has banned travel there from the United States, and with good reason.  Our handling of the Coronavirus has been scandalously bad, making it much worse than it had to be. Rampant across the country are people known as anti-maskers. (sometime in the future, they will be a Wikipedia entry, or a trivia question.)

            We know them all too well; belligerent people who refuse to wear masks, as a kind of protest against what they consider as government overreach.  Because of them and a complete breakdown of leadership on the health crisis facing us, the disease has pretty much taken over.

            Unable to travel, I have been revisiting Paris through photos we took the last time we were there, in May, 2018.  I have been creating a series of paintings, taken loosely from those photos and happily going back there in my mind, at least.

            That visit to the city of light, felt like a return to a familiar place. A city I know very well, in some ways, not so well in others.  Debbie and I walked all over the place, took the Metro and rode on a sightseeing boat. We were averaging around 22000 steps, according to our iphones, coming back, bone-weary to our hotel on the left bank.

            It seemed to me that we were walking through paintings everywhere we went.  So many artists have painted the city, interpreting through classical, to impressionist, and on to modern renditions of the scenes.  The colors of the buildings and the light, filtering through Plane Trees that line the streets, the tourists with their cameras and of course, the Parisians, going about their business.

            My first visit to Paris was in 1963, while our family was living in London. My mother and a friend asked me to come along for two weeks. After the first week, they left me in the pension, (a small hotel), and went home. Her instructions were to figure out my own way home.  With some cash and a sketchbook, I roamed the city, haunting museums and just soaking it all in.

            The Rudolf Steiner School I was attending in London, emphasized the French language above all else, so I was able to speak enough of it to get around.  Eyes open wide, I toured the incredible sights, Notre Dame, St. Chapelle, the Tuileries, the Louvre, etc. The Seine, running through the city, was a constant visual tapestry. 

            Many years later in the 1980s, I was there again, with a little more money in my pocket.  I enjoyed the markets and stores all over Paris, but once again, it was the feeling of being in a painting, or series of paintings. I remember sitting in the Jardin de Luxembourg, watching kids sail little toy boats. Hadn’t I seen a painting of that somewhere?

            On the most recent visit, I again had that uncanny feeling of being home.  All the beautiful sights were much the same, with some changes. The city-dwellers had changed.  Gone were the ancient pensioners, veterans of past wars, old ladies with umbrellas and obvious dislike for almost everything. 

Now the people were a much younger crowd and much more diverse.  The city pulsed with world music and in some areas, felt like a Moroccan marketplace.  We passed the Place de la Republic almost every time we left our hotel and there was a daily protest of one kind or another.  One day it was a Palestinian group, angry at Israel and another time it was something to do with Africa.  The cast of characters changed along with the protest.

Protest in France has become a way of life. We were informed that the Metro wasn’t running much, because of a strike.  Airports, roads, bridges are regularly closed for strikes.  There was an edge to Paris, that I hadn’t noticed before.  Like many other cities around the world, it held a concentration of resentful, angry and disenfranchised people.

We found ourselves walking up and down the Rue de Temple.  There really is an ancient  Jewish temple on the street, but it was closed and very well protected.  Anti-semitism has been making a comeback in France. Did it ever leave?  It’s a wonder there are any tombstones left in the old Jewish cemeteries, they’ve been vandalized so often.

There’s an unease in the streets and yet the old customs of enjoying the good things in life hasn’t disappeared.  The charm of Paris wins you over. Was there ever a time there when things were trouble-free? I doubt it. The city has seen so much trouble over the centuries.  The French Revolution(s). I have heard that there were five of them! The Reign of Terror, the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in WWII. Somehow the character of Paris comes through.

Parisians are tough, even though they enjoy their luxuries. They know how to survive bad times, les mauvais temps.  For me, the richness of Paris is all tied up with the long list of artists that lived and worked there, scraping by in Monmartre, living in unheated garrets. That always seemed romantic to me. 

As time passed, I realized that being a starving artist was not all that romantic. It is a dreary, spirit-breaking existence. Most of the great artists got out of their garrets and found places that were more congenial to art. Their names are now legends, their paintings worth millions.  Their spirits prevailed and they found ways to prosper.

On this recent trip, the romantic ideas of Paris that I had grown up with, had now become compartmentalized into the “tourist world” and the “real world”.  We, tourists arrive, wanting to see the fabulous sights. There are postcards for every one of them and tour guides are happy to escort you to the best vantage points, where you can snap your own and maybe a selfie or two.

In my recent paintings of Paris, I’ve been investigating the feeling of ‘being there’.  Working toward what makes the place real for me. It’s a mix of beautiful sights and ordinary streets, places a tourist walks by on the way to the museum.  It is one of my favorite things, to take the time to watch and sketch, to really ‘be’ there.

Someday in the not so distant future, we will return and explore even more of what Paris has to offer. There are huge areas of the city I have not seen and would like to explore.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy revisiting Paris through my paintings.