I must have been no more than 8 or 9 when I spent a few weeks at my best friend’s family holiday home in Varagnes. I had heard much about it before but somehow that year, for the first and one time, I joined the crazy clan there. My friend Natalia was the youngest of that…
The very first spoof of the Mona Lisa…
I always thought the very first spoof of the Mona Lisa was Marcel Duchamp’s more than naughty LHOOQ but it turns out I was totally wrong. Way before his 1919 ‘appropriation’ another artist, Eugène Bataille (according to Wiki better known under the name of Arthur Sapeck but I had never heard of either until yesterday)…
In bed with… Daniel Smith
(Well, John Cogley really, CEO of Daniel Smith art materials and the man who, for all intents and purposes, has now become Dan Smith) Any reason that would require to go to Seattle I would probably have been game for… I’ve always wanted to go there and see for myself this city of which I’ve…
“A journey of a thousand strokes starts with one good brush.”*
Imagine my excitement when I heard there was a little town, Kumano, which was deemed THE brush capital of Japan and found out there were more than eighty brush makers still making brushes traditionally, a brush festival, a national calligraphy competition, a “day of the brush” week held there yearly AND a brush museum… Had…
Calligraphy, the art of fin(er) writing – Part 2: in bed with Eric de Tugny
For one long hot summer, working in a nearly deserted art gallery in Paris, I tried my hand at calligraphy. After a week or so working there I had even grown bored of reading (me!) and thought this would be a dignified enough occupation if ever the lone patron of the day should wish to look…
Calligraphy, the art of fin(er) writing – Part 1
At some stage in the Western world most of our languages made the switch to a restricted number of symbolically meaningless shapes which, combined, made the infinity of words we needed to share our ideas and our emotions. There are still variations among alphabets and it took a while to agree on the number of letters…
Pigments… from ancient recipes to ‘modern’ colours
I first discovered the PIGMENT store in Tokyo on the web… it arrived one morning in my daily Flavorpill (thank you guys by the way you do an awesome job of weaving an international artistic community), and after clicking on the link, instantly, just like that, I was in love! In a second I knew…
in bed with… 166 Golden owners!
OK, now you think this is one big joke but no… they all own the joint… what can a girl do but say the truth?When Mark and Barbara Golden realized a few years back that none of their children had a real interest in taking over Golden Artist Colors, they made the best move you…
in bed… at… the Golden residency! (I wish)
You didn’t know you really wanted one of these beautiful, curiously shaped red North American barn did you? But you do! Give it a minute’s thought… can’t you just picture your studio (huge of course) under the eaves there, while below smaller and cosier rooms would open onto the grass, the myriad wildflowers in summer,the…
in bed with… the Coates dynasty!
When you take a left turn at the Bird-in-Hand Inn, the heart and centre of the small village of Stoke-St-Gregory, you’re nearly there. Just a few more kilometers of tall hedges which segment the view into small mosaic bits of landscape and presumably house a million nests. Just a few more country lanes with delightful…
2015, the year of… the pencil!
The year had just begun when tragedy on a large scale hit Paris. The town that saw the birth of the pencil as we know it (invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté, then commercialized by him under the name Conté à Paris) suddenly saw its walls literally covered in a few days by hands holding pencils. This…
in bed with… R and F
which in this case is not quite as exciting as it might sound at first as R and F is the same and one man: Richard Frumess! (Designed R&F and chosen because Richard felt it was a bit more impressive than the one man show it was!) Richard, a mellow, charming artist and person, is…
in bed with mona lisa 