Cream Puffs and Soap Bubbles in the City of Light

Emily, the Eiffel Tower and 25 champagne cocktails.

I’ve mentioned before how Paris is truly the American Dream. Americans have this soft-focused view of the City of Light through which the iconic boulevards, the Eiffel Tower and the bridges of the Seine shine through. Absinthe with Hemingway and chic Parisian lovers also figure. The sun shines, the birds sing, and mornings start with a croissant and a café au lait.

For these whimsical views of Paris, a new television show has arrived. Emily in Paris is about a young marketing executive from Chicago who is sent to Paris to inject the American perspective into a hidebound French marketing company. Made by the Sex in the City crowd, Emily is dressed in fashionable fashion, has a glorious big old apartment, a handsome and flirty neighbor, and a cranky boss who she Instagrams into the 21st century.

This is a very silly show. It is cream puffs and soap bubbles. Not a lot happens. Paris apparently has no traffic, no garbage, no poor people, every table is available, parking is easy.

It’s not exactly gripping drama. It’s how the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy described the planet Earth: Mostly Harmless.

The real Parisians, of course, are furious. They think the show is ludicrously unrealistic. Americans who have come to live in Paris are also unhappy. Emily does not show the high cost of living or the scarce real estate options.

What the show does get right, though, is Paris itself. Yes it is shown at it’s best light, but they did not need to invent the architecture and spectacular views. All of those cafes exist in real life. The Paris Opera building is amazing without any added television magic. In that sense it really does show off the city.

So I will keep my Paris fantasies and enjoy Emily. The characters might be thin, in every sense, but they are moving around my favorite city, the splendid City of Light in all its glory.

The Cafe Below Place Goudeau, Montmartre.

Art & Cows in the French Countryside

Some of my latest almost-finished projects.

When you’re rolling off of your latest Netflix binge or asking your partner to please take a shower, it’s easy to fantasize about the old days when you could do things and go places without looking like The Mummy.

Since the lockdown I’ve been painting pictures based on places I’ve visited in happier, more bustling times. I'm also painting the quiet streets and empty countryside of our current situation. Recently I’ve I have had six paintings going at once, none of them finished.

The fact is, for me, the lockdown hasn’t been too awful. My heart goes out to people stuck in small apartments with people that annoy them, but our problems here have pretty much been first-world ones.

It’s confusing. Out here in the placid French countryside where the cows roam free and we have great healthcare, we are in a protected bubble. The pain and fear and anger that the rest of the world is going through is understandable but I don’t feel it the way they do. I can only observe from a distance. I do what I can in my own small way, but my art focuses on what we have achieved, what we cannot lose, what we should celebrate.

I’ve been making short videos that show my paintings and drawings from over the past several years. They are not political, they will not change the world. They are a peek into the my life as an expat who ventures (when it’s safe!) to different parts of Europe to discover new and interesting places. 

We each in our own way want to make our world safe and fair. But we also need to be reminded of what it is to be human and feel those basic emotions; love, fear, wonder, sadness, anger, peace, joy, hilarity. I hope some of these are coming through in my paintings.

Painting Story: The Sights and Smells of a French Street Market

The Olive Seller - available here https://www.louisamccabeart.com/oils/the-park-in-guingamp-p2pgw-6dedh-chlzf-agjah-lfygh

This week I am posting another Painting Story. Since my Cannes show was cancelled in April I am highlighting paintings that would have been shown in the exhibtion.

I am highlighting three paintings this episode, two oils and a watercolor. They are all olive sellers. Click on the link below to see the vidoe.
https://youtu.be/Msnaq6-dPCk

This episode is about street markets. I love wandering around street markets checking out the stalls, buying tasty items, smelling exotic spices, looking at some of the ludicrous hand made items (hand-carved soap santas etc). Paris has a serious of famous markets, but most French towns of any size have their own markets. Even our local town of 3,000 people has it’s own market. Brittany does not have that many specialities of the region – pretty much cider and crepes, which are excellent of course. But at our local market you can go and get Italian cheese, Caribbean mustard, and organic crème fraîche along with the other usual French delicacies.

Markets are a great place to see people going about their business but taking their time about it. They are not rushing for the train. They stop and chat in groups. They meander around. And for a taste of cafe life they meet for coffee and croissants and debate politics and who grows the best potatoes (that one is literally true!). They gossip in line at the butcher’s stall. It’s a very undigital world even if they are clutching their devices. Life is swirling around you.

For a painter this is a lively scene, though in these Covid lockdown times everything is more subdued. If a second wave crashes it’s always good to remember what we are missing. Hopefully we can get back to a new and improved normal when the time comes.

Painting Story - Le Cafe Saint Malo

Europe is an excellent place for cafes. I go as often as I can and I have occasional periods of drawing people in the cafes. They no doubt find it irritating but I try to be discreet. In this video I show a number of different drawings and I highlight my first oil painting of a cafe.
https://youtu.be/ciqtyUOTdCU

Showing Art in the Age of Covid 19

My exhibition in Cannes was unfortunately cancelled when the lockdown began here in France. So the next best thing is to try and do an online show in my living room. Here’s the link. See what you think.

https://youtu.be/ghmph8NoYVM

April in Cannes

A friend of a friend runs an English language theatre in Cannes with an attached gallery. They have given me a couple of weeks to show my work in April around Easter time. This is very generous opportunity, I’ve never shown my work in that part of the country before.

The lake at Huelgoat

Since I”ve been working more in oils recently, framing has become a challenge. For watercolors and ink drawings, small frames and recycled frames are stylish and straight-forward to repurpose. But for larger oils it’s a much bigger investment.

So I have embraced frame-making. I bought myself a chop saw, some glue, some clamps and a bunch of other framing clobber and I’m teaching myself to build simple, classic frames. This is new territory for an old broad such as myself, but nothing wrong with learning new stuff. It’s fun but persniketty. I’ve made a couple of practice frames and have managed to make every possible mistake there is. I’ll start the real ones when I have figured out the right style. Nice to be learning new skills. Making progress! Wish me luck.

Welcome to Northern Ireland!

The latest from Chez LouisaMcCabeArt is my show in Belfast!

The opening is this Friday, August 30, at the East Side Visitor Centre, 402 Newtownards Road. They have excellent parking.

The East Side Partnership in East Belfast is generously hosting a modest collection of my paintings from continental Europe and Ireland. The show is called My Favorite Things, because everywhere I go to paint my favorite views and memories from our travels.

Over the last couple of years we have traveled around France with some side trips to Ireland, England and Spain. One of the benefits of living in Brittany is that you are a brief train/car/ferry trip to some of the most beautiful towns and cities in the world. We have taken advantage of this advantage!

Here is a sneak peek at two pieces from the work that will feature in the show.

Birthday in Primeval times.

My birthday was this week and in the French countryside many businesses are closed on Mondays. We checked for local, swankier restaurants but they were all closed. So for our day out we decided to go to Huelgoat, famous for it’s glorious fake lake and gigantic boulders.

A “fake lake” is when they damn up a stream and fill a valley with water. This one has been here for a while and it’s gorgeous.

Of course we arrived and all the restaurants were open. The restauranteurs of Huelgoat are not silly enough to close during tourist season, unlike some towns I could mention. They all advertised Pizza as one or their main offerings (the current national dish of France) but in fact the Hotel du Lac has a perfectly nice, traditional French restaurant attached. We had goat’s cheese, duck and poulet roti between us, and a fine, half bottle of Graves (Bordeaux) to sip in the sunshine.

When France replants forests they tend to plant them in lines, like a Christmas tree farm. Fortunately this is a natural forest.

Then we strolled through the sun-dappled woods where the river has cut through to reveal gigantic boulders. They really are amazing. You feel like you’ve leapt back through many millennia and expect to get pounced on my sabre-toothed tiger.

The indentation in the rock was apparently an air bubble back when all of this was molten lava. A minute or two ago.

And the place has a primeval/pagan/olde worlde/celtic/running-around-in-skins kind of feel to it. It’s the sort of place where raggedy, tie-dyed musicians come and play the harp and flute and do interpretative dances.

There was a week in 1944 when all over Brittany the panicking German occupiers received orders to publicly execute their local resistance members. You see these memorials in every town. This one is in the peaceful Huelgoat woods.

I have come here several times to paint. It’s tricky to get across the scale of the rocks, you need something convincingly normal-sized, like a human, to show just how house-sized some of them are.

An early attempt at rock painting. You can see that the scale is hard to translate visually. This one is about the size of two cars.

I will make the trek again but with a model who can drape themselves across a rock. It’s too gorgeous not to. All in all a glorious day. One of those moments of delight to store up against the coming winter.

Plein Aire Bliss & Unexpected Treats

Here in Brittany there is an organization called Couleurs de Bretagne. During the warmer months they organize painting competitions in towns around the area. Artists descend on the chosen village and literally paint the town. We compete to be part of the big show at the end of the season. It’s free to the artists and very friendly and dedicated volunteers run the show.

I have participated over the years but these days I tend to go along with my friends for an arty day out in a beautiful town but not bother with the competing part. It can be a wonderful experience although the Breton weather is not predictable. Pouring rain is not unusual.

Last weekend we went to Pontrieux, a beautiful town on the water, with a cobbled center and traditional french, grand houses lining the riverway. My friend Ann found this spot along the river which managed to encompass some of my favorite things: lush foliage, lovely architecture, reflecting water, boats, and of course old stone houses.

In typical Brittany style the morning started out damp, gray and chilly with an uncomfortable cold breeze. As the day progressed the sun burst out in spectacular fashion and made our plein aire crouching much more pleasant. I was inordinately pleased with my painting. Perhaps the sunshine and lack of stress from not participating in the competition made it all more relaxed.

There was also a scantily clad young man going through his weekend warm ups off to the side. A useful distraction for those inevitable moments of frustration.

The afternoon finished off when a classic car club turned up unexpectedly and gave us a splendid parade of old Jaguars, Harleys, and Daimlers. The oddest things turn up here.

Avoiding Bullfights & Friendly Ghosts

A first visit to Pamplona in Spain. Pamplona is famous for the Festival of San Fermin and The Running of the Bulls, where bulls chase young men through the streets before they are taken off to the bull ring to be slaughtered in bull fights. For me this is a horrible business, torturing animals to death as entertainment. But while they have a huge bull ring built in the 1920s where enthusiasts attend throughout the year, and the Festival happens in the summer when we definitely did not visit, Pamplona is a beautiful small city nestled in the hills below the Pyrennes mountains. In the old quarter the tiny medieval streets wind around the central square. There are balconies with iron railings on each floor of the skinny apartment buildings, all jammed together higgledy-piggledy. It’s not Paris where the grand Haussmann buildings all conform to a series of preset styles. In Pamplona each building is different, with a unique architecture and sometimes vibrant colors.

We visited the Cafe Iruña where Hemingway stayed when he came for the festival. I think the city is sick of Hemingway, I only saw him twice, once as a cut steel silhouette on the side of a building, then as a mannequin in the window of a discount clothing store, advertising their fishing gear.

Back in the day my parents got engaged in Pamplona. In the early 50s they visited on vacation, and I can’t help thinking that they visited the Iruña as well. I like to think their youthful shades were sitting at the next table laughing and flirting, while we enjoyed our pinchos.

Musicians at the Pub

When you come to Brittany you realize that there is a large British population that has come over to buy second homes or to retire. Some of our English pals run a pub/brewery where they make Britsh pub-style beer to make the ex-pats feel at home. We walked in recently and saw that some musicians had turned up, unplanned. Musicians sometimes wander in and these ones were excellent. The pub is a stone-built old farmhouse in the traditional Breton style which creates a nice Anglo-Franco atmosphere.

http://www.les-fous.com/

In The Neighborhood

I’m posting some drawings that remind me of how randomly nice France can be. This cafe is La Buvette (The Wheelbarrow), which is one of our locals. The morning crowd has arrived for their first kir of the day, a mixture of white wine and creme de cassis. A little sweet for my taste but very popular amongst the cafe crowd.

The Wild World of Web Design

I’m tweaking the site for a day or two. If you want to get in touch try me on weezmccabe@gmail.com. And please subscribe if you want to know when the site comes back up for air. Cheers all!

Season's Greetings

A little late for Christmas but I have updated my Prints page and tested out the credit card function which is now officially working.

Otherwise, life is jolly and we’re headed to Paris for a party. I hope to see what Paris is like in it’s full Christmas glory.

Happy holidays to you all! And here’s to a more positive 2019.

Inktober 2018 !

For those of you who don’t know, Inktober is a worldwide celebration of ink drawing. Each day of October artists from all over the world post daily ink drawings – sometimes with additional colors.

This year I have started early posting work from this summer and stuff I am currently completing. You can see the results here:

https://www.facebook.com/LouisaMcCabeArt/?ref=bookmarks

https://www.instagram.com/louisamccabeart/

More on the way as Inktober 2018 rolls out!

Something Coming

Group show in Belle-Isle-en-Terre! July 7-20 in the Mairie.