déshabillé

"Le vif oeil dont tu regardes... jusques à leur contenu

Me sépare de mes hardes... et comme un dieu je vais nu."

["Le Marchante d'Habits" by Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-1898]

a study of walls

a study of black and white, pristine and worn, smooth and rough, graphic and abstract, playful and contused...
the contrast of aged corrosion, unkempt upkeep, hidden frictions, interior forlornness...

to the freshly painted, swissly precise, boldly marking, exterior exclamation...

the personalities of buildings expressed through their wall treatment emerge in large spatial vociferous instances...to captivate, to seduce, to invite prolonged glances and even a surreptitious touch or two upon unblemished or weathered skin...

aux vieux murs...

"L'heure passe que les mains de la nuit faufilent aux vieux murs...
Mais qu'est-ce qui vous trouble au fil de l'heure pâle qui s'ourle aux mains noires des grilles?

Plus tard, un peu de soleil dore une feuille, et deux, et puis tout!...
Un rayon rôde encore à la crête du mur, glisse d'une main calme et nous conduit vers l'ombre..."

[lines excerpted from the poem "Au Fil de l'Heure Pâle" by Léon-Paul Fargue, 1876-1947]

paris neige

"Rooftops in the Snow" Gustave Caillebotte
[c.1878; oil on canvas; 64 x 82 cm]
Collection Musée d'Orsay, Paris

from the few times it snows in Paris and the snow actually sticks around long enough for an artist to capture his impressions of a whitened and muted city...albeit over a hundred years ago...
[this painting and a few other [snowless] ones by Caillebotte at the Musée d'Orsay draw me back over and over to revisit his luminous and charmed world...]

fiat lux

from a clutch of multi-coloured lightbulbs' haphazard installation in the temple of modern art...

to the ornate clusters of glittering crystal drops in the church of saint-paul-saint-louis...
drawn to the light like so many tired tattered moths...always hoping to behold a softer, sweeter luminosity...

of lamps lighted very late...

dans un coin le ciel délivré
aux épines de l'orage laisse des boules blanches.
dans un coin plus clair de tous les yeux
on attend des poissons d'angoisse.

dans un coin la voiture de verdure de l'été
immobile glorieuse et pour toujours.
à la lueur de la jeunesse
des lampes allumées très tard...

[From "Max Ernst" by Paul Eluard]

*Post 200*

vers le ciel

cast your eyes upwards and follow the symmetry of birds perched on solid notes of stillness...

as the evening clouds gather, dark lyrical movements unfurl slowly across the skyline...

lumière

"quand, ainsi qu'un poète, il descend dans les villes,

il ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles,

et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets,

dans tous les hôpitaux et dans tous les palais."

[from "Le Soleil" by Charles Baudelaire, 1821-67]

joyeuses fêtes!

" Baise m'encor, rebaise-moi et baise;
donne m'en un de tes plus savoureux,
donne m'en de tes plus amoureux:
je t'en rendrai quatre plus chauds que braise."

[from "Baise m'encor..." by Louise Labé, 1520-65]

chevaux bien frappés

all "knock knock" jokes aside, door-knockers [and their accompanying doors] must be some of the most frequently photographed images in Paris...and every so often one will catch the eye with its intricacy of design and clever use of animal forms in the fashioning of the metal knocker...
to thump on this door with its ornate twin-horses marteau de porte is perhaps to gain entry into an other-worldly realm of decadent refinement and delicious intrigues...and hopefully, not to a boucherie chevaline!

puppy love

an altar in the salon des chiens to honour the irresistible cuteness of puppies as presented by a contemporary ceramic sculpture by jeff koons and an 18th century painting of "la lice et ses petits" by jean-baptiste oudry...
in the musée de la chasse et de la nature, a museum dedicated to the art of hunting and to maintaining the "equilibrium" in nature, where many stuffed animals stare happily at human visitors...

the painterly life

a simple window display taunting us to cash it all in, unload our material possessions and follow our artistic inclinations... to live a life where the most important decision of the day is what size of canvas to use for that image you would like to paint, gather up some brushes and tubes of paint, and with not a care in the world...just what the whim of your subconscious will manifest...

sur un banc

dans un square sur un banc
il y a un homme qui vous appelle quand on passe...
il vous fait signe et rien personne
ne peut vous empêcher d'aller vous asseoir près de lui
alors il vous regarde et sourit
et vous souffrez atrocement...

[lines from 'Le Désespoir est assis sur un banc' by Jacques Prévert, Selections from 'Paroles']

la fille hollandaise

not a sexy halloween costume, but the launch of a line of dutch-inspired lingerie on comely live models...
how I love walking the streets of paris just to chance upon voluptuous sights such as this!

la garde républicaine

[detail of painting]


la garde républicaine [2008]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 90 x 90 cm

the officers leading the cavalry back to their barracks on boulevard henri IV after the inaugural parade where the new monsieur le président had just relished his dream come true... we missed that part of the procession but we caught the tired horses on their way home for some well-deserved pampering on that auspicious day...

suze

the juxtaposition of the early 20th century sign for a popular liqueur with the rambling signature of a 21st century taggeur...look up for a bitter-sweet reminder of the paris of old, faint nostalgia for only a very few now...

canal saint-martin

canal saint-martin [2008]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 60 x 75 cm

along the canal saint-martin, the large plane trees shade a row of orange and red tents provided for the homeless... on this particular stretch the encampment is dwarfed by the highrise apartment buildings across the street, with the matching orange plexiglass balconies...

Likas Drive

Likas Drive [2008]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 75 x 90 cm

the ghostly apparition of my childhood home floats in a garden of tropical lushness...
my father built our first home in a quiet neighbourhood still inhabited by british ex-pats drinking gin tonics on their shady verandahs...
my bedroom upstairs overlooked the back garden where we planted papaya and mango trees, even a large pomelo; there were smaller bushes of mangosteen, custard apple, sapodilla, starfruit...
in the front garden was a mix of fragrant frangipanni, oleander, poinsettia, cascading morning glory on the trellis of the porch, hibiscus, periwinkle, bougainvillea, many species of orchids, and my favourite firecracker plant by the gate...

paris petits

one of the things I love most to do while in france is to eavesdrop on french-speaking children...there is something unbearably poignant and sweet in the sounds made by such melodic voices...["ponette", a movie with the most adorable little girl...]

giaconocchio

in the paris apartment where I stay, a framed drawing of a barely there giacometti stick man hovers above my head, rendering minimalist dreams in black and white after surrendering another day to the overwhelming stimuli that is planet paris...

[giacometti sculpture at the centre pompidou]

l'esprit de l'escalier

I was once being insulted while I climbed up a flight of stairs [usually it is the other way round, when one thinks of a retort after one is already out the door and going down the staircase, as the case may be!]...I was so shocked that I could not think of a repartee until days later, and this was my "l'esprit de l'escalier": "Monsieur, it takes a very small man to feel the need to put a woman down."

parigigi

the lovely flowergirl pranced up and down the steps of the mairie in her elegant silk and tulle gown set off by cherry red hightops and a green plaster full arm cast...christmas colours at a warm june day wedding and a mischievous girl elf who can't quite contained her emerging eccentricities in a city full of such wondrous sights...

888

eight million light bubbles spark off the eiffel tower into the dark nebula of a paris night sky...
stop and wonder at the confluence of charmed lives that are all meant to be...

boulevard arago

boulevard arago [2008]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 75 x 100 cm

known as a vespasienne, after the roman emperor VESPASIEN [9-79AD], who originated the brilliant idea of controlling and thereby squeeze-taxing urine dispersal through the installation of public urinals, this somewhat comical-looking descendant remains sadly the last existing 19th century monument to french piss in Paris...[the others having been eradicated due to overly popular usage for many-manly activities - ironically, this final unsavoury sample has been preserved outside the populous jailhouse La Santé on the boulevard Arago where guillotined heads had once rolled!]

[even though this particular model was commissioned a century before his time, there is an almost prouvesque elegance to the compact structure - especially since I have not emphasized the belle epoque flourishes in the metalwork - the overt functionality of the design can be seen as a prelude to modernist aspirations...]

Lido

Lido [2008]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 75 x 90 cm

one of the cinemas that my father designed in the 1960's...in which I had watched many of the classics from the western cinematic repertoire...memorable films from Dr. Dolittle to Dr. Zhivago, from Disney fluff to James Bond buff...all forming my early exposure to american and european cultural dissemination, and inevitably leading to unrealistic and disillusioned expectations during my initial encounters of life in the canadian "wilderness"...

paris nues

"the brocade strings and reeds weave daily music,
half of it with the clouds, half river breezes:
for music such as this was meant for heaven,
how many times is man allowed to hear it?"
[TU FU, 761 AD]

les nues du soir

"from the south sea did a guest appear
and give to me a mermaid's tear
and in that pearl there were cloudy signs:
I tried to unfurl what lay in those lines;"
[TU FU, 796]

pleine lune

ferry me across the dark distance to this solitary pearl -
so still, so far...
in the full umbra of the alabaster moon, glowing pale fire, mild passions are smuggled and obscured for later disbursement...
on some other night when the moon hangs low again over the next reclaimed isle, softly lighting the steps down to the cimmerian sea.

[from 'once upon an alabaster moon' by g.verster, 2005]

la porte ottomane

an aeolian howl reverberates in the courtyard, rattles the portal doors...
a wisp of paper, leaf, soul brushes against the shutters, providently, just once...
a being in a darkened eyrie contemplates impromptu sounds through the wordless night...
stringendo compositions of derelict noise spiraling aloft...
...brushes up again...
continental elements held together by an unseen extempore force...
still out there fiercely corralling pieces of intangibility...
soon to disconnect and escape, air distrait in the morning light.

['a november wind' by g.verster, 2004]

orangerie [parc andré-citroen]

orangerie [parc andré-citroen]
oil and acrylic on canvas; 75 x 100 cm

one of two glasshouse pavilions on the former site of the citroen automobile factory, now transformed into a hyper-rigid designed park on the south west flank of paris [patrick berger, gilles clément, jean-paul viguier, allain provost, jean-françois jodry et associés (1992-3)]
the exotic plant "temples" showcase a collection of tropical specimens, some of which brings me right back to the wild jungles of borneo...