Tis Fall

The days have been bright and crisp. It's Fall, at last. As I said a couple of posts ago, I'm trying to catch up on posting news.

I changed art courses this year. I joined some friends who were at La Charpente in St. Mandé. (St. Mandé is along the Bois de Vincennes, between Vincennes and Paris.) I signed up for two courses: oil painting and drawing, and I'm enjoying them both. The oil painting is on Thursday morning and there are anywhere between 8 and 12 of us at a time. We each do our own thing and Jean-François, the teacher, does the rounds from painting to painting, helping us out with suggestions and corrections. We do have one painting with a common theme for the year, but even that allows us tremendodus freedom. We have to stick a citation somewhere in a painting. The studio is a former iron frameworks company and there is a galery, which must have been the offices of the company. There's a closet for us to keep our supplies, sinks to clean, plenty of easels and hanging space as well as shelves to stock finished paintings. 

Aude, the owner, started it just 10 years ago, but in a most professional way, recruiting other teachers to work with her and making it polyvalent immediately, so it seems as though it's an old established academy. There are a few students from the Sarah Lawrence study abroad program who get art class credit. I was told that there's a Pitzer student in that program, but I guess she's not taking art.

Aude is teaching the drawing class and it's good to get back to basics and build up from there. I still have lots of difficulty sticking to drawing what I see, at the angle I see it. Maybe that's what I like about Matisse, although I do know that he did master drawing before deviating.

The other activity I"ve signed up for is a Pilates class on Friday evenings. It's right next door, at the former PTT building that became a city gymnasium that bugged us for so many years with the noisy judo and karate classes.The only thing wrong with this class is that it is so late in the evening: 8:45! At least it's not far. There are certain exercised I refrain from -- all the stuff done lying on your tummy and bending backwards. There are exercises I am just lous at, but I'm not the only one.

And, of course, I still go into the library once a week to work at the circulation desk.