(Side note: I’ve made a resolution to stop using the word “amazing” in my writing. It’s proven to be rather difficult for my NY blog posts.)

View from the balcony of the apartment where we are staying – Saturday before the storm.

Minor detour from regularly scheduled activities – a visit to New York. Although Hurricane Irene unfortunately did major damage in other areas, the area of Brooklyn & Manhattan near us were relatively unscathed. These photos were taken Sunday afternoon, after the storm had passed. This is DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

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 been featured in a 40-year retrospective called Poetic License: The Art of Joan Schulze, on view at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles through May 9.

Joan Schulze with The Angel Equation, ©1994, 56 x 57 inches.
Silk, paper, cotton, and transparent overlays.
Photo by Deidre Adams.

Joan’s long and illustrious career in the arts began with embroidery in the early 1970s and quickly expanded to quilts. She has always been an innovator and was an early pioneer in using techniques that art quilters take for granted today. Over the course of the last 40 years, she has made over 1800 quilts and collages, exhibiting a phenomenal dedication and never-ending passion to her work that serves as a true inspiration to artists working in any medium. Her artwork and her poetry enjoy a symbiotic relationship, as each is nurtured by the other. As she says, “Writing poetry is as necessary as stitching cloth.”¹

Joan’s work is known around the world, and in addition to exhibiting and teaching in many countries, she has developed strong ties with artists and teachers in China through her affiliation with the Beijing International Tapestry Exhibitions and Tsinghua University. As she does not have an official academic title, the Chinese bestowed upon her their own title: “Famous Activist of Art.” They’ve since expanded it, but I think this one is succinct and says it best.

My first introduction to Joan’s work came through a marvelously beautiful book which arrived at the offices of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine one day while I was working there as a graphic artist. Titled The Art of Joan Schulze, it was an eye-opening experience for me, containing very large and detailed photographs of her work, along with essays and anecdotes by other artists, and a selection of Joan’s poems. At that time, I was beginning to understand how quilts could be art, but this book transcended anything I had encountered before.

In 2008, I was fortunate to be able to meet Joan in person when she and I and Teresa Barkley shared a hotel suite in Traverse City, Michigan, while we were all there for the opening of the 12 Voices exhibition. Joan and I found we enjoyed a lot of the same things: good food and wine, going to art galleries, taking pictures at the abandoned Traverse City State Hospital (a.k.a. the Northern Michigan Asylum), exploring the nearby roads and towns, shopping at second-hand stores, and admiring stones on the beach — whether on the shores of Lake Michigan or the Pacific coast, as on this recent trip. Knocking about with Joan is an educational experience, as she has a unique perspective and looks at everything in a careful, considered way, seeing what others miss.

I was so excited to have this opportunity to visit her in her own world. We did so much in just a few short days, it’s hard to know where to begin. It was complete art immersion, beginning with Joan’s beautiful house and her extensive art collection, then visits to museums and Joan’s studio in San Francisco, and topped off by a visit to her retrospective at the gallery. On Wednesday, Joan gave an artist’s talk for members of the SAQA Northern California-Nevada region. She talked about the stories and inspiration for each quilt in the exhibition, as well as reading correlated selections from her own poetry.

I won’t attempt to describe the exhibition, but if you’d like to know more, you can read a descriptive and thoughtful review by artist Liz Hager on the Venetian Red blog. Joan also speaks about her life in the arts in this article from the San Jose Mercury News. I also highly recommend a visit to her web site for many luscious images and more information.

Poetic License: The Art of Joan Schulze is accompanied by another beautiful book (to call it a catalog would understate its presence) with photographs of quilts in the exhibition plus many more, and essays by Deborah Corsini, Sarah E. Tucker, and Peter Frank. It’s available on Joan’s web site.

¹The Art of Joan Schulze, 28.

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 excited to be leaving Denver today for a week in Hawaii. I’ve never been there, have always wanted to go, and this year, spring break seemed to be just the time to finally do it. We are much better at spur-of-the-moment decisions than long-term planning, and everything just fell into place at the last minute.

My only worry is that I’ve just heard several horror stories about people having things stolen out of their rental cars while there, so now I’m leaning towards not bringing my good camera. I know I’ll be sorry when I see all the great stuff there is to take photos of, but I’ll regret it even more if my camera goes away, so I guess that’s the answer to that little problem.

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 itself, you enter through the courtyard and find yourself in the newer part of the complex, an addition built in the 18th Century. This building includes a succession of staterooms, one of which features 4 very large and beautiful tapestries representing the biblical story of Esther. There is also a room housing a collection of curiosities, with taxidermied animals, shells, rocks, and other artifacts of nature. Beneath the castle are a series of subterranean passages, including the “casemates” dug in 1944 by the German army for field marshall Rommel and his staff.

You can go up to the top of the old 9th-Century donjon (castle keep), if you are a hardy soul who can forge on past the dire warning signs and make the climb up 250 very steep steps carved into the rock of the cliff itself. Those who do so are rewarded with magnificent views of the village with the Seine beyond.

I also spent some time walking through the village, with its lovely shops and residences. At one end of the village, you can find a walking path that runs next to a beautiful field (maybe it’s wheat? I’m sorry I’m not really up on the grains). The skies in the morning were beautiful with patchy clouds, before the rain moved in for good later that afternoon.

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 ArtStudy lodge. Giverny is a lovely small town in Normandy, full of picture-postcard scenery. In the image above is Chris, a local artist who is a good friend of the ArtStudy hosts, in front of one of his sand sculptures.

A few more images from Giverny (click any image for larger-format viewer):

While in Giverny, we were pampered each day with fabulous food both at the lodge and at the local restaurants. The lodge has a chef who came and prepared some special-occasion meals on non-restaurant days. For breakfast, we had fresh bread or croissants every day, along with a choice of fruit, Müesli, hard-boiled egg (not for me, thank you very much!), yogurt, and assorted juices. The coffee, accompanied by fresh half-and-half prepared from local milk and cream, was wonderful. Since Normandy is famous for dairy foods, we also had some great cheese selections. The thing that most stood out to me was how fresh everything was. Since I’ve been home, I’ve made a point of going to the farmer’s market every weekend to try to keep getting fruits and vegetables that are as fresh as possible.

On days when we didn’t have field trips, the day was spent painting en plein air. We had European style shopping carts that we loaded up with all of our supplies, including a TV tray for a table, and headed out to find a spot to paint. (I’ll post some of my paintings from the trip soon.) Then each day at 6:00, we journeyed down to Monet’s Garden with our supplies. The gardens were closed at that time, so the only people there were us and a few others, artists or photographers, who also had special permission to be there for two hours taking advantage of the beautiful landscaping and flowers. Here are a few of the photos I took in the gardens.

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 century. The catacombs were created to solve the problems of disease and other unpleasantness associated with the vast numbers of improperly buried corpses resulting from war, famine, and epidemics occurring over the past several centuries. The remains were systematically removed from existing cemeteries and relocated in the catacombs. An interesting history, with sometimes unintended humor in translation, is available here.

The bones are stacked neatly in piles, room after room. I couldn’t help thinking about the logistics of how it was done, and what was going through the minds of the people doing the stacking. It’s amazing to me that you can just go right up and touch them if you are so inclined (I wasn’t). They do check your bag as you come out though, to make sure you don’t take any souvenirs.

As you move throughout the tunnel, you see frequent monuments urging you to reflect upon your own life, because hey, you’ll be here yourself before too long.

And of course, human nature being what it is, the living feel compelled to leave their own mark:

After the Catacombs and lunch, the only remaining excursion appropriate to the day is a visit to Père Lachaise Cemetery. As any self-respecting cemetery afficionado knows, Père Lachaise is one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, and it’s the final resting place of such notables as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison, to name a few. The Wikipedia entry has a good list of the most famous permanent residents.

It is certainly a different approach to cemeteries than I am used to here in the States.

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 short amount of time, but some went on their own. I chose not to, because I simply am not into the crowd thing. Maybe some day I’ll get to go again at a time of year when there aren’t so many tourists in town.

Our first stop was the Musée de l’Orangerie, an institution built for the express purpose of housing eight of Monet’s 2×6-meter paintings of waterlilies, known as Nymphéas. We had special arrangements to go at a time when only a couple of small groups were allowed in and were able to avoid the masses of people who come in during the regular hours.

The Monet paintings are installed on curved walls in two oval-shaped rooms lit only by softly diffused natural light coming from overhead skylights covered by fabric filters. Standing in front of these enormous paintings at close range, I began to lose sight of them as paintings. The texture of the brush strokes becomes quite abstracted and is lovely in its own right.

Can you imagine having a studio space large enough to paint something like this and be able to get far enough back from it to see the overall effect?

The Orangerie also has an impressive collection of paintings by Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, Modigliani, Utrillo, Derain, Soutine, and others. But by far my favorite in the Museum that day was a temporary exhibition of work by contemporary artist Didier Paquignon called Tu rencontreras d’abord les sirènes. I had never heard of Paquignon before, and I couldn’t find much about him online, but more of his work can be seen here. (Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find my notes with the titles of these works, below.)

Two paintings by Didier Paquignon, photographed at Musée de l’Orangerie, July 2009

It seems there is no subject Paquignon can’t render with lively expression and sensitive soulfulness, whether it’s an octopus, an urban landscape, a portrait, or a strangely familiar yet ambiguous interior. His handling of color and light give the work an ethereal glow that apparently can’t be reproduced in print. I was excited to find the exhibition catalog in the museum shop, but then disappointed because the paintings appeared flat and lifeless in the book.

Other activities that day included lunch at Le Souffle restaurant, a trip to the Musée National Picasso, more walking, a little shopping, and still more walking.

Harry Potter et le Prince de Sang-Mêlé is a big deal here.

A few of my very favorite things: concrete and rust and peeling stuff.

(I’d like to hold a caption-writing contest for this one.)

The last tour for the day was the Centre Pompidou, a vast, multi-storied institution with multiple exhibition halls, research facilities, performance halls, a restaurant, an amazing bookstore, and so on and so forth. My only regret was that we had just a couple of hours here. I probably could have spent 2 or 3 days, quite happily. In addition to an amazing permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, the Pompidou was hosting major retrospective exhibitions of work by both Kandinsky and Calder. I didn’t have time to get through both of them, so, since Kandinsky has always been one of my favorite artists, that was the one I chose. One of the interesting things about the exhibit was that, in addition to the paintings, they included a selection of pages from Kandinsky’s notebooks. I always love seeing a glimpse into another artist’s thought process, but when it’s Kandinsky, well, that’s beyond cool.

The Pompidou structure is also quite interesting. I didn’t get a good shot of it, but you can see one here. You can decide for yourself whether you think it’s awesome or hideous, but regardless, the views from the top are spectacular.