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.

We went to the beach today. It was a wild, windy day in the middle of a tropical storm, somewhere out in the Gulf of Mexico.  The water was flowing up higher than ever, making it hard to find any beach at all. I stood in the roiling surf, feeling the power of the ocean, getting lost in the urgent movement of the waves.

Standing there was not so easy, because the current constantly washed the sand out from under my feet, forcing me to move.  Nearby a little island of sand, crowned with sea oats, was in danger of being washed away, held tenuously by the roots.  The water churned around it and behind it, pulling as much sand as it could away from the base of the grass.

It all seemed very precarious. Behind, about 100 yards in, stood a neighborhood of homes. In their midst, a huge new one loomed, arrogant in its concrete skeleton.  This was a minor storm, not a hurricane, but even so, the water was reaching far into the usually dry areas of the beach, moving toward the houses.

Instead of finding all this alarming, I felt a sense of comfort from the action of the waves.  It’s the natural rhythm, to wash away and rebuild the sand. The narrow strips of land, called “keys” in Florida, are really only large sand bars with expensive waterfront homes built there. It doesn’t take a lot to realize the whole premise of this real estate is only temporary.

Like sand castles, they will be washed away. 

            So why do I feel soothed by the violence of the waves? 

Perhaps it is because the ocean represents Nature to me. Nature doesn’t worry about our sand castles.  It doesn’t care about our little lives.  All the worries and troubles that are afoot in these strange times are nothing to it, in the vastness of geological time. 

I use the word, “wash”, to describe what the waves do and it is a good description.  It connotes a cleaning, purging process that deposits bleached bones and worn shells along the beach, witnessed on quieter days half-buried in the smooth sand.  I am calmed by the knowledge that Nature always prevails.  

Maybe you, too, have been calmed by the wind whistling in your ears on a stormy day, or the sweet aftermath, when the violence of the waves is only a memory. 

All over the world we have built great cities by the water. I love them, with their incredible complexity and beauty.  Places to enjoy the company of other people, experience the diverse cultures and flavors.  

I have visited many of them and get so much pleasure from sipping café at a table by a busy street in Paris or Florence, crossing a footbridge on the Thames, catching the morning ritual bathing along the Ganges in Varanasi.   Too many pleasures to list, but thinking about these cities, I realize they are all built next to water.

It makes sense, building by water.  We, our bodies being mostly water, use the rivers and oceans for food, washing, transportation and travel.  However, this fluid element we think of as benign, is capable of catastrophic destruction.  Those cities are flooded periodically, when the storms hit. And those storms are created and propelled by water, activated by sunlight. 

In our own house we had a mini water catastrophe, brought on by a clogged washing machine drain. The wooden floor buckled to where the outside door couldn’t be opened.   Three weeks later, the kitchen is still being redone.  The convenience of washing our clothes in the kitchen, had its price!

This misfortune pales to insignificance, when compared with the plight of refugees in overcrowded, rickety boats, crossing some stretch of sea, in search of a better life, only to be wrecked when a storm hits.  Poor castaways, clinging to pieces of wood as the relentless waves wash over them!

Nature is heartless.   It simply is.  Standing at the shore of an ocean that doesn’t care if I live or die, is both terrifying and exhilarating.   Somewhere in the innermost regions of primitive consciousness, we understand Nature.  We understand the ocean, because we are the ocean.