Homeward, the Long Way
August 11, 2026
Six weeks, four countries, one full camera. The gate at Charles de Gaulle, a plane pointed at Istanbul, and the long hop home to the studio. Last post from the road.
Monday’s list had one word circled on it: Sennelier. The rest of the day was just the walk there, and the Left Bank does not do a boring walk.
The gallery streets behind the quai Voltaire were still yawning when I came through. In one window, a chrome tree hung with green glass bubbles, dozens of them, each one holding a warped little upside-down version of the shop behind me. I stood there longer than I will admit, watching the street bend around inside them. Next door, a showroom of lamps and straw shades and, in pride of place, a vintage table football with worn wooden players. Somebody in this street decided play belongs beside the Picassos, and I am for it.
Then a wall stopped me. Galerie Duret had its shutter half down, but mounted on the front, a whole peloton… rows and rows of little painted steel cyclists, each one cut and coloured differently, all pedalling across the facade in formation. It is by David Gerstein, an Israeli sculptor who has been making these painted-steel riders for decades. It is everything I chase in ink, movement multiplied until it becomes pattern, except he does it with a plasma cutter and every colour I refuse to use. I filled half a page of notes standing on the footpath.
I detoured through the Palais-Royal after lunch and walked straight into a film set. Camera rigs between the columns, cones and tape everywhere, and actors in period costume strolling the colonnade like the twenty-first century had been cancelled. I filmed it, of course. And then watched it back and found every single frame had somebody’s face front and centre, so those clips stay in the sketchbook pile. You will have to take my word: the colonnade with high waists and hat brims in it looks exactly right.
And then, the pilgrimage. Sennelier, 3 quai Voltaire, mixing paint for artists since 1887. Cezanne bought his colours from Gustave Sennelier. Degas had soft pastels made to his liking here. When Picasso wanted a stick of colour that could go on anything, it was this family who worked out the oil pastel for him. The shop still smells like all of that… wooden cabinets to the ceiling, pigment jars in ranks, drawers of nibs and brushes, and a creaking staircase where the wall is papered edge to edge with little drawings left behind by visiting artists. Hundreds of them. My list said brushes and nibs for production work back home, and the drawers said yes to both. I could have stayed a week.
Last full day in Paris, and it ended in a paint shop older than Federation. Correct.
Six weeks, four countries, one full camera. The gate at Charles de Gaulle, a plane pointed at Istanbul, and the long hop home to the studio. Last post from the road.
Last full day in Paris, so I got up before Paris did. Notre-Dame at six in the morning, an empty square, and the discovery that I was not actually first. The locals were already doing their rounds.
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.