My Paris Sketchbook

"Take these two words, gold and pleasure, for a lantern, and explore the great cage of Paris."

-Honore De Balzac

“We want you to go to Paris” they said. Well it was work so off I went. Everyone I suppose develops their own personal relationship with the city. For some it starts with a book, a film, or maybe a visit. Such was the case with me as I started traveling to Paris to complete a vast project our firm was designing in the Middle East. It was not my first visit to the city of light. My parents had dragged me around to the sites when I was fourteen and the endless churches, museums and brasseries had not gone over well and I spent much of the vacation complaining about the l’eau avec le gaz and seeking out unattended pinball machines. This time it was different. Like so many previous generations of romantics, I suppose, I fell in love with Paris.

During those first couple of weekends, with trusty map in hand, I started feeling my way around, gradually sifting through the layers of this extraordinary mille-feuille of a city. Over the course of the next year, a sketchbook went with me everywhere. Often I wandered at will, with no predetermined destination in mind. Whenever I saw something that interested me, I turned another page in the sketchbook.

Drawing is my method of remembering things. Before I sketch, I tend to simply look at the subject intensely for an extended period of time. Because it is only in the looking itself that the image becomes etched into my brain.

As I returned to the city again and again, and I began to stay longer each successive visit, my initial impressions evolved. I began to reach a deeper understanding of the city, how it worked and my place in it. Then, just when I was convinced that I had it all figured out, Paris would startle me yet again with the depth of its beauty or reveal something totally unexpected.

So that is the genesis of this collection. It is an incidental and casual visual diary, spontaneous and haphazard, but governed always by one overriding aim: to try to absorb and to ultimately capture "the great cage that is Paris."

One of the most underrated walks in Paris

Location of the comfortable and convenient Sydney Opera Hotel

Standing on the corner of the rue de Morengo looking southeast towards the Église Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.

Sacre-Coeur Railing
(Click on image to enlarge)

"Time is the architect, the people are the builder." — Victor Hugo

These adorn the pilings on the approaches to Pont Notre-Dame
"Father Mars, I pray and beseech thee that thou be gracious and merciful "

I had first seen a version of this field kit being used by a woman working in the Jardin de Luxemborg one afternoon. I promptly appropriated the idea and constructed one of my own. Compared to the plastic ones that proliferate the market, this one is virtually indestructable. Born from a salvaged Altoids tin with the exterior sprayed in flat black enamel and a semi-gloss white enamel sprayed to the guts. It holds ten half-pans that are held in place with a thin strip of double stick tape, as well as a collapseble brush. Great at setting off the x-ray machine at aiports as well.

Cour-du-Commerce st.-Andre

(Click on image to enlarge)

La France de Louis XIV

from the Quai D'Orsay

Architects: Joseph Cassien-Bernard & Gaston Cousin

Architect: Charles Garnier

The Rotunda, or folly at the Parc Monceau
Architect: Claude Nicolas Ledoux

My version of the lay of the land

Lost at sea.

I like this one because it was done in a fairly steady rain and ended up actually worth saving.

with Sainte Chapelle behind
Architects: Joseph L. Duc & Honoré Daumet

La Colonne Vendôme
Modeled after Trajans Column to honor Napoleon.

Assemble-National

One of my favorite spots.
The view from the top of the steps of the Eglise de la Madeleine at twilight. I would often sit here to take in the view looking down the Rue Royale, past the obelisk at the Place de la Concorde and all the way to the Asemblie Nacional across the Seine .

An icon nestled in a perilously small niche on the rue du Mont Cenis, caught my eye one day in Montmartré. It was a figure holding a child (Mary and the Christ child? St. Christopher?) and it reminded me of how much I missed my own kids.

The obelisk (Cleopatra's needle)
Egyptian: 1450 BC
Aswan granite This once stood at Luxor

The world's most visited cell tower.

. Lots of rain this year so the locals tell me.

A wicked head cold is responsible for keeping me from finishing this on the Avenue de Villars in the 7e, just off the Boulevard Invalides.

The skies threatened and then opened during one early Sunday morning sojourn to the butte.

A study of light as much as it is of detail

"Life is on the bridges"
- anonymous graffitti

The view from my vantage point and clear evidence of a fudged perspective. I probably spend more time on and under the bridges than anywhere else.

A French architect told me that rioting Huguenots defaced these figures in the 16th century, considering them idolatrous. The originals are over in the 5e at the Musee de Cluny. Right jamb, from L-R: John the Baptist, Saint Stephen, Saint Genevieve, and Saint Sylvester (PS- The same architect e-mailed me and pointed out that I had this misidentified as The Portal of Saint Anne.)

Raining again

neoclassical roman details at the Arc de Triomphe
Architect- Jean Chalgrin

Pyramides du Louvre. Architect: I.M.Pei

My Paris Soundtrack:
Buskers at the Jardin de Luxembourg.
Sax version of the Acker Bilt classic "Strangers on the Shore."

descending into the abyss

Perhahs the second most visited arch in the city. I prefer the other one.

Architect: Johann Otto van Spreckelsen

Sometimes a quick thumbnail helps to loosen up a bit. On the other hand, trying to sketch from the middle of the street can also almost get you killed.