This is the last post for Travel Journals! Thank you to everyone for reading!
These are portraits of four of my classmates from England I spent a lot of time with. I thought these would be a good ending for the journals.
For more of my work, I regularly update my blog, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down. You can also view my home portfolio website at CathyBoy.com
This is the last week of Travel Journals. Thanks to everyone who has been reading! On Friday will be four portraits of friends that I made in Farnham, Surrey.
Final day in Paris, then off to Lorient to visit Mickaël.
Only two more updates after this. I’m starting to wind down from my travels, as well with the journals. Page 3 is the funny sheer mismatching curtains Mickaël had in his apartment. Page 4 is a seagull.
Click here to see Renoir’s Le Garcon au Chat: click. As Page 1 says, I cried in front of that painting. It seems odd looking back on it now, but in person it really affected me. It also says I dropped my paints, though yes, it looks like pants.
Page 2: “Life is mildly perfect at the moment.” Second breakfasts are all I need for life’s perfection. If I could extend my morning lulling and coffee-sipping time to about 2PM, my life would be absolute perfection, no doubt.
Page 3 is a Millet drawing, whom I got into at the Louvre because I was reading Van Gogh’s Letters at the time and he loves Millet. The only picture of this drawing I copied is here and is unfortunately tiny, I’m afraid.
Only three more updates!
I was drawing in the Notre Dame during a mass and a man in front of me kept turning around and giving me the snake eye for not standing up and participating in the ceremony. Whatever Catholics, I have a drawing to do!
Page 2: That restaurant. Was ridiculous.
Page 3 is perhaps the most infamous page in all of these journals. Yes, it’s true: That painting literally froze while I was painting it. It was that cold.
The bottom of page 4 has some endearing notes I took about Impressionists. I have grown quite the soft spot for them because of this trip.
Paris.
I am going to transcribe some lines from page 2: “I wasn’t going to do anything cliche like draw the Eiffel Tower, but it just happened to be right there. There are kids adorably skateboarding around and there is an overwhelming scent of piss in the air.”
Page 1: The art show I’m talking about was really fantastic, I derived a lot of inspiration from it. It’s because the pieces weren’t as, well… loudmouthed as I find current American art tends to be. It was calm, dignified, but in a way that covered the decimation and domination the city of Prague felt in its past. Love it.
I mailed that knife to my father later from England, and while I was trying to mail it you have to declare all of the package’s contents on a sticker stuck to the outside of the box. I wrote “knife” and the postman freaked, and said they wouldn’t let it through. Well, I was too busy for this nonsense, so I got a new sticker and did not write “knife” and the postman was disgusted with me (in his British kind-of-way). But it got through customs just find and dandy. Duh, of course it did. What is the knife going to do inside of a box?
Page 4: Took an overnight train from Prague to Köln (Cologne, Germany) and then from Köln to Paris. That painting of the snow in the streetlight actually has a lot of influence on the paintings I’m doing right now; I think about it a lot.
It was pretty romantic, an overnight train to Paris. I did a lot of writing that night in a different sketchbook thing, these are the bare-bones journal entries.
Page 1 is an explanation of the last few pages. Page 2 is a drawing of a “Czech Restaurant” with a gigantic neon sign, complete with arrow, deeming it so. Pages 3 and 4 are of the Prague Castle and its surrounding cities. I got very, very cold drawing that.
Only about a month or so left of updates for Travel Journals!
More Prague.
While doing page 1′s drawing I think was the only time I got creeped on by someone in my travels. What I mean is, while I was drawing it, a man was standing really close to me, not in a “I want to see what you’re drawing” kind of way, in a “this girl is standing still and by herself” kind of way. Basically I walked away, and he left, and I went back and finished it. So no big deal. I think I’m telling you guys this to account for the crazy dimensions in the drawing (that frieze was not round!), as my mind was distracted by being on high-alert.
So happy new year, 2010! *cough* Bringing in the new year in Prague was crazy. I’m going to be honest, Prague was the only place where I was thinking that maybe it would be better to not be alone in. I wasn’t comfortable wandering around by myself like I was in the rest of Europe, which was pretty fucking irritating. I hate feeling that way, but you kind of have to trust your instincts. I stuck to the more toursity places.
Page 3 and 4 is a ballet! The entries on Monday talk about it more, but basically I thought I was going to a Bertolt Brecht ballet, which sounds insanely awesome, and it turned out to be… Goldilocks. A Czech version of the fairytale, but still. I couldn’t mask my disappointment well so I spent the whole time drawing this spread. (If you know who Brecht is, think about it, a Brecht ballet?? That sounds soooo coool!)
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