Follow the Journey
One artist, one daypack, one sketchbook filling up fast. This is the live map of my working trip through Europe… every pin is a stop on the road and a journal story to go with it. Click a pin to read what happened there, or start from the beginning in the An Artist in Europe journal.
The dotted line is the route so far. New pins land while I keep moving, so check back in. Same pen, new pages.
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.
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.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
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.
Yesterday this hill was licensed painters and a queue for portraits. This morning at twenty to eight it was me, a tagged post box and a merry go round standing perfectly still.
Three artists broke into an abandoned bank building on the rue de Rivoli in 1999. The city ended up buying it for them. Today you can walk up through thirty working studios for nothing, and I did.
The painters' square in Montmartre runs on licences, one square metre each, renewed every year. I went up to see how that works and came back down having photographed nothing but walls.
The graphic art gallery I had walked across Paris for does not open until half past twelve. So I got the street instead, and the street was better.
I stood in an empty white storefront in the Marais and worked out how many drawings would fit on the walls. Then the Bourse de Commerce filled its rotunda with fog and made the sums feel small.