Alaskan Raven Studio

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Audacity. Do what you didn’t think was possible

January 12, 2014 by alaskanraven

Audacity. Isn’t that what living is all about? Do it. Be audacious.

Street lamps, sunshine and old buildings make a feast for my eyes. I have wanted to experience this place and have the audacity to paint it. Renoir painted it from a cafe window in the spring of 1872. He sent his brother out to talk with the people in the street to make them stand still for his painting. Monet sat at the same cafe window in the fall of the same year and painted his version.

One hundred and forty one years later, my brother and I walk across the oldest bridge in Paris, Pont Neuf. My first day in Paris. We ate crepes and headed for the Seine. I was oblivious to the people, totally immersed in the sensation of walking on the stone in the shadow of tall street lamps.

My first painting gathered the facts of what I saw but lacked the feeling. How to capture the sensation of actually being on that ancient bridge?

I started again with a bigger brush and larger sheet of Arches watercolor paper.

Swashes of color for the sky. Very wide sidewalk. I hint at the shapes of buildings whispering secrets. Street lamps march to the horizon. I paint the woman walking toward me, but no, she became me and I turn her around. I’m a transparent orange silhouette immersed in my own experience. The world is a kaleidoscope of orange sunshine and blue shadows.

This is what Pont Neuf feels like to me on my first day in the city of light.

Brilliant orange and full of possibilities.

IF

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: painting, Paris, Pont Neuf, watercolor

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More Adventures

contact me with questions or comments

Alaskan Raven Studio
PO Box 80231
Fairbanks, Alaska 99708
USA
alaskanblackbird@yahoo.com

 

Represented by:
Well Street Art Co.
1302 Well Street
Fairbanks, Alaska
907 452-6169

Stephan Fine Arts
939 West 5th Ave.
Anchorage, Alaska 99501
USA
(907) 274-5009
http://www.stephanfinearts.com/

more about Raven

I ventured to Alaska before there was an oil pipeline and fell in love with the gnarly spruce trees, intense weather and mountains I could touch. Very different from the landscape in St. Louis. I was looking for different. The spruce trees: those scraggy, wizened, lanky conifers danced onto the first page of my sketch […]

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