I saw Julie and Julia tonight in midtown and met several other film and food blog enthusiasts to see a movie that partly, takes place in New York City right after 9/11, and also 40 or 50 years earlier, in Paris, France.

I liked the movie a lot and met before and after it with a group of food enthusiasts, including some bloggers (and then there was me, a blogger, as well) at  Luce Restaurant & Wine Bar – 2014 Broadway- see the two short movies, below.

I did 3 new sketches and an number of events such as the SuperSense @ Rubin Museum (RMA), a panel on Monetizing Online Video Panel at Ultra Light Startups plus Interesting Cafe at Clickable featuring Garrett Brown and Girls in Tech Relaunch in the last week, not to mention the Social Media for Social Change event last Friday night where I donated 3 paintings and lost my Web 2.0 Strategy guide and a purple scarf (maybe it’s just misplaced since I can go back to Roger Smith Hotel and see if they found my stuff).

There’s also another project that my friends and I are hatching that may involve an Art Show and Web Summit in Manhattan – we’ve seen the space and it looks promising – that’s all I can say at this point.

And while I wanted to paint more – I managed to do a few sketches on Saturday that I posted on Facebook, but I’d like to blog about them here.

At the Met

This sculpture that I drew is the same one I sketched a year ago – I kinda wanted to see how I’d do it differently this time – I’m a little looser, which is good.

Life drawing of Claudia

All three sketches are done in my personal notebook which I carry with me where ever I go.   I may not draw all the time, but I’m ready to draw when I need to.   I’ve drawn this model before and while she’s painfully think, she’s also great as a model.

I spent all afternoon and most of the evening painting at Brooklyn Artists Gym; decided to do a large painting based on my study of trees in Paul Cezanne’s back yard, the one I did the first day I arrived in Aix-en-Provence 3 weeks ago today.

Here’s the painting – it’s done in Oil Pastel on Canvas and is something like 3 feet by 4 feet in size.

 

You know the study for this painting was Cezanne’s Back Yard, but the painting drew, somewhat, on the ideas I got back in Paris a couple of days before when I saw an exhibition of Pierre Klossowski at the Centre Pompidou.  Besides liking the drawings on paper (canvas to me) I found out that Pierre Klossowski was the brother of the painter Balthus.  While the sexual symbolism is not my thing – the feeling and quality of Klossowski’s work is my thing and decided, then and there, I would buy an expensive book (in French, no less) based on the exhibition, and find a way to use that insight in my painting when I got back to the New York.   And this painting of Cezanne’s Back Yard was my first attempt and using crayon, or Oil Pastel, on Canvas.

“..Pierre Klossowski, April 2-June 4, 2007 – The writer and philosopher Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), a friend of Rilke and Georges Bataille, took up art on the prompting of Robert Lebel, André Masson and Alberto Giacometti. Centre Pompidou is to show drawings, prints and sculptures by Klossowski in Spring 2007. Klossowski also worked with a number of film directors, as writer or actor: with Pierre Zucca and Raoul Ruiz in the early 1970s and Pierre Coulibeuf, Michel Nuridsany and Alain Fleischer in the 1980s. A program of films in which Klossowski was involved will also be shown.”

While my inspiration may have started with Klossowski, it was mostly about my time in Cezanne’s last studio in Aix.   And here’s the movie I made just as got done working on this large painting – my hands all “green” with oily pastels, have drunk 4 glasses of Red Wine at an opening that happened at BAG last night – where I freely moved back and forth to the studio area and to the photography opening.

I was also thinking of the Van Gogh in the Clark Exhibition at the Metropolitan I saw the night before – how powerful it is (was).

I decided to try something different today and painted a large painting/study from an oil pastel sketch I did in Aix-en-Provence last week.

The painting is about 3 or 4 feet long by 2 or 3 feet high (don’t know the exact measurements) and was based on the study in this post Leaving Aix-en-Provence and Traveling back to NYC – Last Aix Post.

I made a video on my thoughts about this painting  (see above).