Went back up to the Arc for the end of the day, along with roughly everybody else in the eighth arrondissement. There is a short window around eight where the sun drops into the arch itself, and for those few minutes the whole avenue runs on brass.
You cannot paint this light honestly, people would say you made it up. The stone goes from grey to gold in about four minutes, every ridge of the carving throws a shadow, and the traffic turns into moving silhouettes. One cyclist crossed right through the bright patch and became a piece of punctuation.
The thing I will keep is the cobbles. Thousands of them, each one catching the sun on its own worn face, so the road becomes fish scales. If I ever paint this it will be the road, not the monument. The monument has enough portraits.
Then down into the metro to head home, and even the corridor would not let the art day finish. The Picasso museum has papered the walls with its posters, six thousand works, one museum, says the small print. One of them is his rooster drawn in a single line. A whole day of galleries above ground and the best hang of the evening was next to an escalator.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
A day of looking through glass. A gallery window near the Palais Royal, a photograph growing a charcoal mountain at the Drawing Lab, and a two metre pink figure guarding a window full of toys.
