I am in Paris for the month of January. Being in Paris means looking at art. Painting and sculpture in particular. I regard famous and lesser known paintings alike, marveling at the brush strokes. The physical evidence centuries later of where the artist’s hand met the page, his or her DNA still there.
Looking at all those individual strokes, sometimes hundreds of them – sometimes thousands – makes me think that I could never be a painter. That I would never have the patience to sit and make all those tedious strokes, one after the other. But then I sit down to write just 500 words and realize that if I don’t have the patience to be a painter, I may not have the patience to be a writer, either.
Because pen strokes are like paint strokes, individual marks placed on a page with just as much tedious consideration and reflective precision as a paint stroke. Word choices are like color palettes, evoking mood and emotion. Punctuation is like white space, setting the rhythm and cadence, leading the reader’s eyes and mind where you want them. Highlighting some things, de-emphasizing others. Drafting is shaping the outline and editing is layering the paint to develop the hues and effects that give the collective words nuanced meaning, each pass of the editor’s eye a glaze layered on top of the edits that came before it. To place these things initially at all, then layer, combine, and arrange them thoughtfully so that they convey meaning, is time consuming.
[T]he artist can spend years painting the picture, gradually shaping the outline and painting in the details with thin layers of paint (a glaze). Corpus-based painting, whereby artists try to give their painting an air of completion straight away, is not, therefore, typical of the classic oil painting style. Deliberately applying the paint in layers makes it possible to achieve remarkable hues and effects, since, during glazing, each previous layer is visible underneath the next one.
Writing is art, too. And a writer is an artist. Sometimes I forget that.
I like to take my notebook and pen down the Rue des Abbesses to Café Les Fistons. Sitting out in the cold because omicron, but French cafés long ago evolved al fresco dining in winter to include strategically placed heaters under generous awnings. They weren’t all of a sudden forced to figure this out due to a pandemic the way America has had to and consequently, the experience dining outside here is much nicer. That and, well,…I’m in Paris. One could argue that everything is nicer here.
Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
Paris’s weather is so much like Seattle’s: it feels like home. But then again, it doesn’t. At all. I find it hard to merely conjure memories of my past let alone write about them in this setting so different – so very, very different – from where I grew up. So I just write morning pages about everything and nothing. Nothing and everything. Because getting the strokes on the page is what matters.
Counting.
Things That Nourished My Writing: January 1-January 17.
DESIGN
Parisian streets. How they came to be so beautiful.
Because we’re remodeling: toilet design.
FOOD
Pain Pain. A bakery on the corner near my French flat in the 18e arrondissement.
Bonne Maman Galettes Pur Beurre
Je Thè…Me and Le Comptoire.
The Beans on Fire (a Parisian coffee shop).
LITERARY
Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
MUSIC
A Paris-inspired playlist, made by Shazaming the music I hear while moving through French space.
PLACES
Rue des Abbesses, where I’m staying in Paris.
The staircases of Montmartre, where je fais mes exercises.
PEOPLE
My French-American friend, Lisa, who hooked me up with her French-American friends in Paris so I can practice my French extra hard. xoxo.
The patron of the above-mentioned Je Thè…Me. What a character!