The City of Lights, dimming, slumbering . . .

"Dimsum" 2013, Oil on linen, 50 x 50 cm

The month of November here in Paris, with its continual forecast of rain and grey skies, leads to a lot of seasonal doldrums, moodiness, and gloominess.  Add this less than ideal weather to the ongoing recession here, the result is a potent mix of morose and pessimism that is all pervasive.  Just in my immediate coterie of friends, everyone is worried about salary cuts, worsening work conditions, lack of prospects . . . all necessary adjustments to the down cycle I presume, but still, going lean is always tough.

The recent article that Eric Mircher, a gallerist here, wrote on his blog gives a general sense of the art trade here.   It appears that Paris,  well, is past its prime, that opportunities are fading, that careers can no longer be made, that the conditions for an optimal art trade is now made elsewhere, in China especially (he is reviewing a show of the Chinese art star Zeng Fanzhi):

L’amertume pourrait gagner tout jeune peintre vivant à Paris aujourd’hui où précisément ces mêmes conditions ne sont plus réunies. Et ce ne sont pas les fastes de la dernière FIAC qui masqueront la faible représentativité des artistes vivants ici et si peu ou mal représentés en son sein.

Bitterness can take over all young painters living in Paris today, where the precise conditions [those needed for a career] are no longer coming together.  And it isn't the ostentatious splendor of the last FIAC art fair that will hide the weak representativeness of artists living here, and so poorly or so little represented, within it.

All food for thought, but this leads me to want to expand on why I stayed to work here as a painter.

I had the first premonition of having found a place where I could grow some roots sometime in 2009, my first months here.  It had initially been planned that I would just come here for about 8 months.  It was during lunch -- we were having a "hot dog," not the usual kind that I used to love at baseball games back in the US (instead inside a baguette "bun", there is a Francfurt sausage, gruyère cheese, all melted together in the oven) at a café.  I was there with an idol of mine, a renowned craniofacial surgeon who had spent his life and career here in Paris.  Sitting there at the café talking about Proust, I had the sense that life spent in a city that one loves and is rooted in is essential.  I needed to find a city to grow in, as Paris was to Dr. Daniel Marchac.

Up until then, I had lived a very itinerant life, since birth, it had been a constant and continual series of moves -- Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Michigan, Geneva, Vermont, Bloomington (Indiana), Boston, New York (Harlem, Bushwick, the West Village), Philadelphia . . .  Initially, I had thought that growing roots would mean finding a city back in the US where I would settle in -- it could have been Philadelphia, or New York again, or Baltimore  . . . I think I would probably have been able to settle in any of those cities.  In any case, the contingencies and vicarious surprises of life ended up installing me here in Paris.

And my relationship to Paris is a vital part of my life because I feel nourished here artistically.  It isn't surprising, given the density of history, of museums, of intellectuals in this city, that someone like myself would find inspiration here.  It is difficult to explain the sort of mind-space that I find here, one could call it "feeling the vibes" or simply just saying that I have found "peace, " and it is all that.  But more precisely, it is as if after a very long journey, the pieces of my mind's puzzle has finally fallen into place, and the constituents of that puzzle, a map of sorts, can be consulted now.  Under these circumstances, the only thing left to do is to follow this mind map, to find a way to preserve the sense of well-being, that cocoon of fertility, that the map provides.

 * * *

I have spent the past week or so reading an old book that I had bought back in 2003/2004--Robert Hughes' biography of Goya.   I had purchased it when it first came out in hardcover but had not read it until now though I had made a start back then.  One grows accustomed to Hughes' short essay style--the one he is known for as an art critic--and I had a hard time a decade ago reading this biography, with its will to explain the conditions of late 18th century Spain, the world of Goya.  I probably would not have understood the details of the biography very well anyway back then.  There is a world of nuances that I had no idea of back then and a lot of it I had learnt the past 4 years.

 I guess the word is subtlety--discerning differences, being acutely aware of the differences of quite similar things--that is what living here in Paris has opened for me.

* * *

Finally, the painting above, "Dimsum", a small piece where a group of older Asian people are having lunch, and in the background, a Parisian street.  In the foreground, a young European is slumbering.  A hundred years ago, it was America buying up Old World castles and luxury.  Back in the 1980s, it was Japan.  Now it is China's turn.  Just all a part of the cycle.