Snow and portraits

Hi
It's snowing in Paris. Lovely but it means a total go slow. I'm not feeling very inspired anyway. There seems to be very little feedback, whether it be good or bad from people regarding arts these days. I'm not going to try to do anything for a few weeks. I'm just ging to go with the flow and see what does or doesn't happen.

I've been enjoying drawing people on the metro. Will post a few drawings of them here later. I've also been doing more portraits in oils. That's come to an end for the moment. I won't do any more commissions till January at the earliest. In fact, I think that I'll concentrate on Gravure. I've been missing my friends in the engraving group for some time now and thanks to the fact that I'll be handing the gallery over to someone else in January I'll be free to get back to that. Running the gallery has been so incredibly time consuming. Very interesting of course and I learnt a lot but so many other things that are important took a back seat as a result. What I learnt is invaluable though. It has given me a totally new outlook on art and the art world.

Here are some of the portraits I've done this week. Neither is finished and both were executed very quickly. I'll finish them off later. Oddly enough I've found that instead of speeding up through doing the portrait sessions, in fact I've slowed down. Great way to get to know people though.

The sun came out in Paris :)

We had a couple of days of sunshine, something that has been a bit rare this year. So I took advantage and got out as much as possible. There were a couple of parties and I got to the Louvre. That's another couple of things that I've been missing with all this activity lately.

So here are a few photos.

First off, a small party. I've been doing a lot of engraving work this year. Mostly thanks to a bunch of local architects who pushed me into it and motivate me to keep at it. So thanks to Jean-François Vincent for that. The other photo is Pierre who drank too much wine at the little exhibition we had.






I was at a party last night but didn't take any photos. It was in the 10eme. Had a great time at Helen Tangs. Lovely people and mostly artists.

At the Louvre today, there weren't too many people for a change. So I visited the Dutch artists section. I'm incredibly impressed by the work of Pickenoy. Not only are the paintings still in perfect condition but they are fantastically well painted. The paintings are from the 16th century but look as though they were painted yesterday.

No doubth the Louvre restorers deserve a great deal of credit but the paint is uncracked, the colours smooth and beautifully applied and there is incredible grace and aliveness in the portraits. To find a photo with the same life in it would be more than a challenge. I don't think it would be possible. These details are from the portrait of Johanna Le Maire




Here's a marvelous detail from a painting by Gerard Dou.


I also had a wander around the streets of Paris and visited the Palais Royal. There I saw the famous Vefour restaurant. Apart from the great art and the the incredible restaurants there is always something good to see. It's worth wandering around this area anytime the sun is shining but especially on a Sunday as they have students of the academy of music performing classical music on the street.



I'll post more photos of exhibitions etc on my newsletter. Be sure to sign up. It's on the bottom of my homepage. http://tjbyrne.com