Chagall, with the proper respect

 

Holy crap, that Chagall guy is a helluva painter!

Last time we talked about the Chagall Museum, right up near the end of last year, we gave the whole story; the way the museum works, the pleasant little walk there from our apartment, a bit of its history, its lovely garden cafe. Then with a little AI flummery I put myself in some of his paintings for fun, and with that another day at clerkmanifesto was taken care of. 

But with a "Free first Sunday of the Month" and a new show they had up at the local Chagall Museum, we went for another visit, and, well, check out my opening sentence. So I thought I'd take a more Chagall centric approach to this visit.

That said the first thing we did after going into the Chagall Museum was to go to the garden cafe. I love their garden cafe. My town has brilliant street cafes and even beach cafes, but is a bit lacking in its garden cafes.

I had a spritz.

After going through the security into the museum proper, we eschewed the permanent collection of biblical paintings. Brilliant as they are we have now seen them a few times, and we were excited about new stuff. 

The new stuff was work and preparatory work toward a production of a ballet of "The Firebird" in New York in the forties, around where he was living during the war. And then there was another smaller room showing his work for the ceiling of the Paris Opera, maybe from the sixties? I'd really like to get up to Paris to see that ceiling!

Picasso said of Chagall "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." It's a pretty nice compliment. Funnily enough up the street from the Chagall Museum is the Matisse Museum! And even more funny, I saw this same quote featured in the Firebird show, only in the Chagall Museum, the Matisse part was omitted! It said "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Ha!

Either way, Picasso might have been right. Although I don't know who all the other painters were in the world in order to go that big. Wasn't Rothko alive? He might have had an inkling about what color really is.

But all that nonsense aside, the colors in these Chagalls are crazy good, with that curious quality in all great painting of magic, not flying goats magic, but magic leaving one wondering how strong colors like that could possibly work so clearly and richly together and alone! And yet, in this Firebird show I equally enjoyed something about Chagall's crazy drawing fecundity. I wish I could draw like that, that is, kind of terribly, but have it always work perfectly. He has all these mad lines like he can't decide on one, and he's not afraid of ridiculous cartoonishness of hands and feet and faces, but again, it weirdly comes together. Wasn't all this the stuff they warned me in art school drawing classes that we should never do?

Chagall had a pretty funny quote about Picasso. He said "What a genius that Picasso. It's a pity he doesn't paint." I like that quote. I too wish Picasso painted a bit more, you know, stuff. But what can you do, somewhere in the middle of that century painting started coming apart and it was so great at first, but then maybe it was impossible to put it back together again.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures of some Chagall Firebird works and, well, no reason to do anything to them but show you and let you have your own reaction. Here they are:

Light of day

 

As I am doing a lot of drawing and layering of pictures, I am accumulating many images that haven't found a place here yet. But in looking them over I did come to the stunning realization that

NOT EVERYTHING I WORK ON HAS TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

So with that in mind, I'll leave off a few thousand things I was thinking of showing you and go with just these:

A few days ago I came up with a Tolstoy inspired title for my post and felt strongly enough about it to put it on my shirt, at least fictionally. Then I spent quite awhile making it into this self portrait drawing:

Here we have a picture from Tokyo, of a train crossing near the house we were staying at just beyond the edge of a fabulous park.

We loved that place we stayed at despite it being FILLED WITH SPIDERS! Which speaks to its other qualities. We often came home late at night (for us), down a canal path and across these train tracks. We were in the biggest city in the world, but it felt like a lonely country railroad crossing:

And finally (and with that word I will be axing hours of prepared material for you!), there is this drawing I made or worked up out of an already much worked up image from the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite places in Japan.

Coffee in Kyoto

 

What I meant to say yesterday, when I was talking about wandering the world for half a year, before I got sidetracked into a bit of...

comedy,

is that if, of all the places we have been and visited and eaten and drinked at in this last half year, if there was one that I wish we could take with us, and have with us next door forever, it would be a modest coffee shop in our neighborhood of Kyoto.

It isn't easy to say why.

Located in the most absolutely quiet backstreets of a neighborhood, a few steps from the backside entrance of a genuinely insignifigant, though perfectly charming little shrine, Kononeki had limited hours so we learned to plan our week around it somewhat. Featuring a simple design of small tables, a couple of them even just for one person, plenty of wood, an open counter kitchen area, and a few shopping selections, Kononeki served mainly coffee. And toast.

These were very good.

And if anything else were available or on the menu, you'd really better get them.

No, I mean it. They will be better than you think.

No, even with my warning, they will still be better than you think. Like, functionally you won't be able to imagine it.

It is not your limitation.

It's just.... Kononeki.

The proprietress is very nice too.

I have drawn a picture for you. It makes me wistful:

Looking for fun stuff on the Internet

In the half year since we left our home of more than 30 years, ventured across the world, and landed in France, we have seen a few things.

No, no, I'm not bragging. I know. So have you. You have seen tons of cool stuff.

Yes, I would love to hear about it!

In fact, I am simply dying to hear about it! All this social media stuff is poisonous. These horrible giant Internet mega sites are killing us. Put your blog address here and I am ready for the ride of my life!!!

You, you don't have a blog?

Sigh.

 

Magnolias in France

 

When I first started adding photography to clerkmanifesto, a curious road that currently seems to be leading me more and more into drawing and painting, the earliest inspirations were flowers. And among the first great blooms in Spring, when I started, were the Magnolias.

Every year after that first, I would take pictures of the Magnolias. Their bloom happened so fast and felt so early, often with snow still on the ground, that they felt extra special, and every stage of their flowering and fecundity delighted me. I loved their twisted little buds, the dazzlement of their lush blooms against the cold blue midwestern skies, and their multicolored decays. They were always gone too before I felt like I was repeating myself.

And then I moved to France.

And I figured most things would be different.

Things are different.

For instance, the flowers never never never stop around here. There are things blooming exactly the same, and in the same place, as they were blooming when we first moved to this city three months ago. And some of these flowers are so showy! I know them from expensive bouquets and dreams of jungles, but here they just... are. Waiting around with a smile on their face, in the dirt.

So I wasn't really thinking there would be Magnolias.

But there are Magnolias!

They don't stand out as much, but they're just as pretty.

French failings are like everyone's, but their virtues are their own

 

I was sitting here writing a very difficult post for you, trying to come to terms with the surfeit of security in France. I wondered why so many places have airport-like security entrances, some of them patently ridiculous. 

And as I dug in it just got, what with terrorism and nationalism, racism and colonialism, it just got... deeper and deeper.

Around paragraph five I suddenly realized:

I don't get paid for this! This is a lot of work!

So I stopped. 

Yes, I would have continued if my acute and clear prescription for the situation were going followed (in short; more leftism). 

But it won't be.

So I'll just wait in line here like everyone else then.

These French people are surprisingly good at waiting.

Me me me me me

With a bit of injury in my household that I won't go into right now, though everyone is currently doing well,  I have been continuing my drawings which have increasingly more drawing in them and less photo manipulation. I am the subject yet again of today's drawing. This could be narcissism or just the fact that I am a very handy subject matter, available at a moment's notice. 

I suppose these are not mutually exclusive.

 

Cannon at noon

 

If we are in our apartment and doing something calm and quiet enough, we hear the deep, percussive thud of the cannon at noon.

In my city they fire off a cannon at noon.

If we're down at the foot of the old city, among the vegetable and flower markets, and noon hits, it sometimes scares the bejeezus out of me. But it scares less and less bejeezus out of me because I have a dwindling amount of bejeezus in me. Either way, it's nice to know it's noon. For people who get up rather late, noon always has a pleasant feeling of there being plenty of day left.

I've heard a fair share of church bells at noon over the years, and they can be a lot of fun and quite pretty, but they can also be a bit uncertain that they're about noon until you've listened for awhile. And sometimes it turns out they're not about noon at all! 

Not so with a cannon.

No, one cannon once a day gets right down to it. Absolutely no chance of mistaking that one. Just a single arresting second, a little less bejeezus, and you're on your way.

Menton me and Japan, the unfinished business

 

Here are a few unfinished notes from the last few days posts involving Menton, Japan, and my hat. And what these notes really come down to are pictures from the small stories I told you that were either redundant to the tale of the day, ever so slightly surplus, or simply not yet finished.

I won't go into too much detail about how I am making most of the pictures I show here now, but it involves a lot of editing, generating, layering, erasing, and drawing on, into, and from my original photographs. It can take some time to finish each one, and that doesn't always coincide with what I'm talking about here. 

And so then, with that as your explanation, here is another picture of me in the hat I bought in Japan:

And this is an old photo from the area very close to where I bought that hat, in the museum district of Kyoto. Nearby and running through, there are some very pretty and broad canals regularly populated by Japanese Herons. As this was one of the nicer heron pictures I took in Japan, I have shown some version of it here before, but it comes now refreshed as halfway to a drawing.

And finally, in my mixed review of a local trip to the city of Menton, the pictures were mainly of the citrus floats in the center of town. This one is from the old city of Menton, typically just barely protected from a noisy road, and yet exceptionally lovely and peaceful. At the end of it one can find one's way into an astonishing little alley complete with a nice ceramicist, and then carrying on, take that narrow alley down to a thriving square of charming restaurants, which will then dump you out on, yes, a busy road and a parking lot.

Me again in france with my Japanese hat

 

In Kyoto there was an area of museums we ended up going to a lot. The neighborhood was marked by a gigantic Torii Gate, those famous red gates often seen in sequence, these singular, and a gigantic 100 feet high. Pictures of that iconic site certainly appeared here last Fall. The area was particularly beloved to us as a place curiously off the main tourist paths (though not as much as our own neighborhood!). It seemed to draw lots of Japanese people, particularly on Sundays, which felt like a family day. I'm not saying it wasn't a tourist area, but the museums were not world class and there were large theaters in the area, so it just felt more "civic life" than "famous Kyoto", though of course that line is blurry.

Also, there was an afternoon tea place there that made one of the best affogatos I ever had, with butter ice cream.

And we had a nice meal at an eel restaurant in the area too!

Once, walking around this part of town on a weekend, a festival of some kind was going on and someone was selling hats they made, repurposed out of other old clothes and materials. I bought one! I really liked it, but in Winter, in France, I stopped wearing it. Maybe the hint of Spring caused me to bring it out, and now I seem to be wearing it again.

Feeling a bit pleased with it I took a picture of myself (or seven) and made something of a drawing of it, a self portrait.

And so then, for today, here I am in my Japanese hat:

Menton for good and ill

 

Here is a picture from Menton's citrus festival:

I have real pictures too. And maybe I'll even show them to you.

 They're...

fine.

And so is the citrus festival.

And so is Menton.

Actually, Menton is kind of great and horrible. Gorgeous ocean, magnificent old town scoring probably as high as an eight on the Seussian Scale of old towns. The shops, bakeries, and restaurants look pretty nice, though after several months around here I've come to recognize sadly how many of them are chains, even if they're maybe more local chains than international ones, but plenty of those international ones too. And when one comes to a pedestrianized street, almost exclusively leading into and through the old town, it really is a lovely place. There is absolutely nothing like it in the country I come from.

And then, unavoidably, are the roads. 

Where the citrus festival centers, it is along a kind of parkway center between two streets that they apparently couldn't bear to close entirely off, a kind of grand boulevard ruined for any real use by its devotion to traffic. The ocean too, of course, is lined by a road with its unholy roar of cars, buses, and motorcycles racing urgently along it, and though there are a number of lovely squares and sidewalk restaurants, a big road full of traffic always seems just around the corner, like there's this pretty little city for tourists, mixed artfully in, but the real city is a working city for suburbanites, a... Dubuque Iowa.

I believe this has seeped into the very soul of Menton and is expressed in the magnificent citrus festival displays themselves. A lion, giraffes, a woman, pelicans, parrots, these giant magnificent sculptures are entirely made out of citrus fruits, mainly oranges and lemons, until one gets to, like, the important parts; the giraffes' heads, the woman's face, the paws of the lion, and the head of the parrot, and then, all of a sudden, they are no longer made of fruit, they're plaster, or fiberglass, or whatever is usually used for giant cast figures like that. And it's not bad. It's so not bad we're all willing to overlook it, 

but, let's not lie...

It's not quite amazing, is it?

And neither is Menton.