A Week in Pictures

The Sunset last Friday at Pacific Beach in San Diego, CA

Madame Hessel in the Boudoir, Rue de Naples, ca. 1935 by Edouard Vuillard--one of my favorite artists--at the San Diego Museum of Art

The view from the Ocean Beach Pier in San Diego

Where the Keebler elves live. (A tree in Balboa Park)

Mirrors on the wall of my aunt and uncle's living room in San Diego

Young Girl in Front of a Window, 1930. By Suzanne Valadon. At the San Diego Museum of Art.

Flowers at Disney Land

This man rollerblades while dancing to music up and down the sidewalk at Pacific Beach.

Nom nom nom--a panda at the San Diego Zoo

Wenches for sale in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land

A pillow at the Disney Land Hotel. Really.

San Diego Zoo

My uncle's lamp collection in the spare bedroom

I returned yesterday from a weeklong visit to San Diego, CA to see my aunt and uncle. We also went to Disney Land and California Adventure, and January must be the time to go. There weren't many crowds, and most of the lines were only five minutes long. My dad and I rode 18 rides, and my mom and my aunt rode 17. (They wouldn't ride California Screamin', the roller coaster that goes upside down.) That's a new personal best for us :) The weather was--for the most part--sunny and perfect, and now I am back to chilly weather and piles of snow. Bookish posts coming soon.

Happy Friday,

Revising a painting

I'm trying to start and finish a couple paintings before the school year begins, but I feel like I can't move on until I fix this one that I did for a class in June:

It was my last painting for the class, and I finished it just an hour before final critique. Consequently, I didn't get a lot of time to look at it and let it talk to me. I knew it didn't want the top of the figure the way it was, but I didn't have time to figure out what it wanted instead. This painting stumped me all through July and into August, until I remembered a painting I'd seen and photographed at the Art Institute of Chicago in July:

Portrait of Constance Pipelet by Jean-Baptiste-Francois Desoria, 1797, oil on canvas.

I like the figure's pose and attitude, so I decided to appropriate bits of it. I don't know if my figure will hold a book, and I know she won't have the same hair, clothing, etc. (The high heels stay!) But seeing this painting again got me out of my rut. Artists borrow from art history all the time.

In any case, here's a picture (it's a little awkward-looking because I took it with the camera on my laptop, which was not easy) of my progress so far. I accidentally made this great pink color that I added in a few places, started some apples on the right, and sketched some of the figure in with charcoal. (The lines you see now will probably all be rubbed off; they're just placeholders.)



So now I'll keep looking at it, adding lines and pushing and pulling them back. It's like editing a paper. Almost.

I Found Creepy Uncle: Paris Part Trois

If you didn't know, there's a bookstore near Notre Dame called Shakespeare And Company. Readers may recognize it from Stephanie Perkins's Anna and the French Kiss or Vanina Marsot's Foreign Tongue.

Graphic Design Prof and Painting Prof enjoying the little table in front of the store.

If you like books (and if you're reading a blog called Bookduck I think it's safe to assume you do), you should go there because the inside is a bibliophile's dream:

BOOK HEAVEN.

Ahem.

Signs asking visitors not to take new books to the upstairs library.

Me pretending to read (thoughtfully) in the upstairs library.

I could have spent all day in Shakespeare and Co. I didn't buy any books there (which I regret) but I did buy some French-language children's books at another store. One of them, Il Etait Une Fois. . . (or Once Upon a Time) by Benjamin Lacombe is a gorgeous pop-up book that needs no translation:



Beautiful, n'est pas?

*****

The Louvre is pretty, too. It's the world's biggest art-history-geek playground. See the painting below? We turned a corner and stopped dead in our tracks because we knew it was a painting from the earlier part of the Italian Renaissance by Cimabue, a Florentine painter.

Staci, Me, and Becca in front of Cimabue's The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels.

Our faces when we found it. (Jaimie, our media major friend, is not sharing in the Cimabue excitement.)

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. We couldn't get closer because of the crowd surrounding the artist copying the painting.

La Jeune Martyr or The Young Martyr by Paul Delaroche (Image from the Louvre's official website.) This painting was new to me. It's hauntingly beautiful in person.

This appears to be an installation piece around the medieval walls of the Louvre that are now enclosed in the museum's lower level.

And (last but certainly  not least) I found Creepy Uncle!!!

Readers of Stephanie Perkins's blog will remember him from last January's Hot Boys of the Louvre contest. He's not too shabby in person--just a little, um, menacing. And pale, very pale. I was probably near the Mr. Darcy painting but I didn't see it and didn't have time to go looking. I guess this means I just have to go back to Paris?