Deidre Adams

Joan at SFMOMA. Photo by Deidre Adams.
Last week, I had the great privilege to spend several days visiting my friend Joan Schulze. Joan is an internationally recognized artist known primarily for her quilts, but she also works extensively with paper, making collages and artists books, and she is an accomplished poet. Her work has just [...]

Much as I love winter, I’m really ready for it to be over right now. A large proportion of our north-facing back yard was buried under snow from November until just last week — very unusual for our location. Then yesterday, another storm with dreary gray skies and rain-snow mix all day. So I’m very [...]

View from the top of Château de la Roche Guyon donjon. ©2009 Deidre Adams.
One of our day trips while staying with ArtStudy was to La Roche Guyon, a short ride from Giverny. It’s a charming village whose main feature is a castle, the Château, which was built in stages over many years.

In visiting the Château [...]

After a couple of days in Paris, we took a train to Vernon, whose French pronunciation was often ignored by members of our group, probably giving rise to varying reactions of amusement or perhaps consternation by the local residents. From there, it was a short ride in the van to Giverny, the home of our [...]

On Tuesday, some of us had had enough of the museum thing and wanted to change things up a bit, so we decided to pay a visit to Les Catacombes de Paris. This is an underground ossuary housing the remains of over 6 million former Parisians, built into an erstwhile quarry during the late 18th [...]

Monday was museum day. If art museums are your thing, there’s no better place than Paris. By this time, all of the group from school (Metro) had arrived, and we went together to several of the museums. We didn’t go to the Louvre as a group, since it’s just too overwhelming to do in a [...]

Staircase, St. Sulpice, Paris. ©2009 Deidre Adams.
After reading about this in Rick Steve’s Paris, one of the things I most wanted to do was go to hear the organ at St. Sulpice Church. Never mind the fact that the church is a big tourist attraction, especially after it was featured in the DaVinci Code, (look [...]

Notre Dame Gargoyles. ©2009 Deidre Adams.
My flight into Paris was an overnight one, so I arrived there at 6 am on a Saturday. Due to various assaults on the senses that take place on flights now, I hadn’t slept at all, so the day was spent in a strange state of mind. Another woman from [...]