Giverny

Oh dear. It's been a while.

Nov 1st, Giverny, Café, France
Giverny is beautiful, a riot of flaming autumnal colors, set against broilingly violet sullen skies and romantic little ancient cottages. It is a glorious, pensive, and slightly melancholic place; it is no wonder that this is where Monet set up. Sometimes the colors are such that I feel I cannot see anymore. Or, conversely, they are such that I feel my vision becomes piercingly clear and crisp, as if I have just woken from a long sleep and am seeing properly for the first time. The people in this café seem content and it is warm. This, with the colors, makes me miss home and heightens the pain of being away from my family during the holidays, a first for me.

So, that gives you a small sense of what Giverny was like. For those of you who don't know, Giverny is where Monet lived and worked. It is very beautiful. While I was in that cafe, there was awesome French music playing. It was a nice respite from the bitter cold of the day and there were comic book images all over the walls, and lots of light coming from a window in the ceiling. I was super excited, because usually I just hear American music everywhere, and the French music I do hear is super poppy, so I kept asking the names of the different artists. The chef (he was wearing a blue striped chef hat and had a pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth at one point) took a box off the shelf, rifled through it and handed me two cd's which he said were for me to keep! I was super happy. When I payed for my coffee, I handed him a flower that I had picked in the hills before going into the cafe, and he smiled and tucked it behind his ear.

While I was painting in Monet's garden (it was Halloween, incidentally, so my face was all painted up like a mask) I became a Japanese tourist attraction. A bunch of old Japanese ladies came up to me, huddling around and cooing. "Kawaii!" (cute!) They said, pointing at me, and then (assuming I was French) pointing at my drawing and saying "Belle-u!" Then they each took turns sitting next to me on the bench and having their pictures takes, several of them making the stereotypical peace sign with their fingers. It was a somewhat surreal experience.

Monet's garden is stunning, by the way, even in autumn when the flowers are all wilted. The colors are flabbergasting. The last day, I stayed in the garden until they kicked me out, so I had the whole lily pond to myself for a while. It was great. It was raining, but I thought it was worth it.
ART.

We also had a sculpture workshop with world famous sculpture Greg Wyatt. You know, like ya do. You can see some of his work here: http://www.g-wyatt.com/gallery.html
Anyway, he spoke in a monotone that I found hard to pay attention to at first, but as he is actually a genius, I suddenly found his words hitting me as I started to work, and all our sculptures turned out really cool. And he only had two days with us! Also, he arranged for us to get a tour of Kubertin, the foundry that Rondin used and for whom is is the resident artist. As if that wasn't enough, he is also paying for them to make a bronze of each of our bas-relief sculptures that we made, which is 60-70 euros a pop! All in the name of furthering the arts. What a guy. We talked about trees and Shakespeare together for a while. He is an intelligent fellow, and I feel very fortunate to have met him. He won me over by using King Lear as a metaphor to explain a point he was making.
A cool thing to demonstrate the quality of Kubertin: When Rodin worked with a foundry for the first time, he would make a point of leaving a fingerprint on the sculpture somewhere. If, in the final bronze, he could no longer see his fingerprint, he would not work with the foundry again.
And they are going to bronze something I made! Eeee!

Tomorrow I will try to write about Venice. I just got off a train from Paris, but I started the Giverny post a while a go and forgot to put it up, so I thought I'd get that out at least.
Goodnight!