Show and Tell.

I have exactly 5 minutes to tell you what I've been up to:

So for the past week or so I’ve been working my butt off. I’m working really hard not just because I have an Art Fair to prepare for, but because I really want to try some new ideas and new tricks with my paintings. So I’ve been setting up these little exercises to experiment with color and composition….but mostly I’ve been playing with color.

Just for fun, I set up one particular color scheme which is totally and completely counter to what I would usually choose. I was thinking about how a friend of mine told me years ago that she only dreams in black and white. I found that so strange that for some reason it stuck in my head. So I came up with this color scheme and decided to limit my palette to just these colors:

But after doing a very thin underpainting, I ended up with this:

Lesson learned? "If you're born a lion don't bother trying to act tame." For whatever reason, we gravitate to whatever colors “belong” to us. I cannot see the world very well in black and white…..or shades of monochrome. The painting isn’t near finished, but one thing is clear.


Baby, I dream in big bad color.

This Is My 200th Post But....

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Sorry.

Old McDonald on Acid.

I have no caption for this photo…all I know is that it’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a French supermarket in quite some time. And that’s really saying something.

I begged FrenchBoy to let me buy a huge cock for our bedroom, but he refused.

So my question is….is this somehow related to the upcoming Easter Holiday?

Madame K vs. Mademoiselle K.

OK, this has nothing to do with nothing, but I had to bring this up just for a brief minute.

The strangest thing happened to me while I was in Paris. I suddenly became a “Mademoiselle” again. As soon as I stepped off the train I noticed that everywhere I went in Paris, servers and cashiers automatically referred to me as “Mademoiselle”.

Now, I'm not complaining, but I found this little fact both strange and fascinating. Here in Eastern France I am always referred to as “Madame”. In fact any woman who is obviously past her mid-twenties is a “Madame” in my neck of the woods regardless of whether or not she is wearing a wedding band. But in Paris this is certainly not the case. Even my friend Nat, who is adorably 6 months pregnant, gets referred to as “Mademoiselle” when she is out and about in the city of lights.

So of course now I am crazy curious to hear from the rest of you ex-pat gals in France. (A bunch of you will have to de-lurk for this little poll.)


Where you live, are you a “Madame” or a “Mademoiselle”?

The One Where I Go To Paris To Eat American Food.

So I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Paris visiting my friend Nat and her husband Seb. They’re expecting their first little French-TexMex baby in a few months and I really wanted to get to see her while she was still all adorably cute and round. Fun was had by all. It was a much needed break from my recent working schedule. Plus with the new high-speed TGV it only takes me 1 hour and 30 minutes to get from my doorstep to the middle of Paris. Wait, why don’t I visit more often?

Tuesday I headed over to La Grande Epicerie to buy some goodies for FrenchBoy and then I went over to Sephora on the Champs-Élysées to visit the MAC counter. And eventhough I’m a total lip-gloss whore, I didn’t end up buying anything.

Wednesday I went to the Pompidou to see the Louise Bourgeois retrospective and a few other exhibits, but before I did, I ran two other pretty important errands:

Before yesterday I hadn’t had a piece of Fried Chicken in almost a year and I had been thinking about it incessantly. Starbucks was a total after-though, but since it was less that 100 meters away from KFC, I had to go see if they had carrot cake. And they did!

Now for those of you who are gonna go get all bitch-ass weepy at the idea of Paris being infested by Starbucks, if it’s any consolation, when I went in it was almost completely empty and the over-priced coffee I ordered did in fact taste like “pee-pee de chat”*.

Feel better now?

Also---How funny is it that the above photos are the only 3 photos I took in Paris?

*Commonly used French expression which compares the taste of American coffee to cat piss.

Work. Work. Work!

For those of you that may be worried by my fairly infrequent blogging lately, I just want to assure you that all is fine. I’m not about to stop posting, I’m just up to my eyeballs in work right now. I’m busy, but good busy!

Next month I’m showing a bunch of new paintings in a huge regional Art Fair (nevermind the fact that the paintings don’t technically exist yet), and within the next two weeks I have to finish a small edition of hand-made Artist Books for “Carnival” the New York Foundation for the Arts 2008 Spring Benefit.

Now, I knew I had all this work coming up, so I scheduled last week to be a sort of “in-home” vacation to relax a bit before the insanity began, but wouldn’t you know it, the over-achieving workaholic in me worked right through it. And good thing I did because if I had just planted my ass in front of my flat-screen for a week I would be even more buried under work than I am now!

*trying not to hyperventilate*

Ok, sorry. I’m calm now.

Anyway, So cuz of all that I don’t have any ridiculously funny antics to share with you, but instead I bring you….adorable baby pictures of my nephew Landyn because he's so cute it actually hurts me a little to look at him.

OK, enough of that. Back to work! Chop Chop!

Those Crazy Frogs: «Piou-Piou»

One of the loveliest things about being married to FrenchBoy is the absolutely asinine conversations we have in bed just before we drift off to sleep. Over the last few months we have talked about countless idiotic topics including but not limited to: the spiritual meaning behind snoring patterns, to what degree your brain shuts off your ears while you are asleep, and my personal favorite- a lively debate over whether or not we should start sleeping farther apart so that one night we don’t accidentally die from asphyxiation due to hours of breathing eachother’s carbon dioxide.

So it is no surprise that last night we found ourselves in a discussion about French onomatopoeia. You see, I have one of those alarm clocks that simulates the sunrise. In addition to the gradually increasing light, instead of a normal alarm sound, which makes me wake up in a fright, my alarm plays a recording of birds chirping in the forest. Chirp chirp chirp. While we were talking about my chirping alarm, French boy informed me that French birds don’t chirp or tweet or sing instead they go:

After I stopped laughing, I informed FrenchBoy that no bird on earth, not even a French bird, could possibly make the sound « Piou-Piou» because birds don’t have lips to form the “P” sound. At best perhaps a cow could go « Piou-Piou» seeing as they obviously have lips if they are making the “M” sound in the french «Meuh», but even that is a stretch.

In the end FrenchBoy and I agreed to disagree.

Other French sounds you should know about:
A dog goes: «ouah ouah»
A horse goes: «hiiiiii»
And one of my personal favorites: «Cocorico» for "cock-a-doodle-doo"

If after reading this post you still have time to waste, go to this website and educate thyself on animal languages around the world.