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.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about doing galleries in a strange city. You get up early because you are excited, you walk half an hour with a full bag, and you arrive at a beautiful door with the lights off and a sign that says half past twelve.
Twenty to ten. Rue de Charonne. The graphic art gallery I had come for takes up four floors and two hundred square metres of contemporary drawing, and it does not open until the middle of the day. My own fault. I had the address, I did not have the hours.
So I stood in the street with the whole morning in front of me, and the street started handing things over.
A little girl in a flag dress, pasted low on the render, standing with her back to the whole street and her nose almost against the plaster. She is not looking at you and she is not looking at Paris. She is in the corner.
And look at the wall she is on. Four or five layers of render coming off in continents, a grey tide line halfway up, islands of old paint. I spent longer on the wall than on the paste-up, which probably tells you something about me. In ink that surface is all dry brush and broken edge… you could not draw it neatly if you tried.
Another window, another closed gallery. Inside, a figure built out of rusted checker plate and painted offcuts, with a head made of cut metal clouds. One tiny eye. Whoever welded that had the confidence to leave the rust exactly where it landed, and I stood there working out how you get that many textures into one silhouette without it turning to mud.
Then this, which made me laugh out loud in an empty street. A skinny building with a flag in every window. Sweden, Germany, the States, South Africa, Brazil, Switzerland, Argentina, France, Portugal, two more up in the roof. No Australia. Eleven windows of the world and not one of us.
Last one before I gave up and went down to Bastille. An aubergine door, two brass knobs worn gold in the middle, whitewash flaking off red brick all around it. The kind of purple you only get away with on a door.
The market was on the list for today. What I actually have to show for that leg is two video clips shot at Bastille, and I have now watched them both. One is zero seconds long. The other is one second of my thumb. A whole career in animation and I still cannot press record properly.
Up the hill next. There is a square up there where the painters work, and I want to see how they do it.
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 said one word: Sennelier. The paint shop on the quay that has been serving artists since 1887. On the way there the Left Bank gave me green glass bubbles, a wall of steel cyclists, and an entire film crew in the Palais-Royal.
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.