Paris Today: Heaven or water

Graffer's motto:

 The world is our canvas

 

Can you see where it is? 

Graffers go to Heaven, why do they call these places Heaven spots?  

Because they're high up and

sometimes someone falls, goes to Heaven.

 I went to Honfleur.  Lots of art galleries but not many tags.  It's so quaint.  I was looking for graffiti but didn't find anything until I walked around the port, found this fabulous boat.

 

The world really is this guy's canvas.

 

Paris today

Paris is full of pollen this Spring.

And rainbows.

 

The Luxembourg Gardens are always beautiful but this Spring the layers of green are more evident than last year.  Last year Spring exploded in one week.  The pollen didn't have time to build up.  This year, Spring is what we imagine and expect. 

I haven't posted in some time because I'm busy rewriting and planning a new website where I can encorporate my two blogs.  No idea when that will be because in October I have a show and have to produce 80 paintings.  Plus finish this rewrite.

Luxembourg Gardens is tourist Paris, though locals hang there too.  I do. It's in my hood.

But there is another Paris, a street artist's city. It's grungy and dark.  Here is a mural, in the 13th arrondissement, near the Biblioteque François Mitterand.  Notice the trees have no leaves.  This photo was not today.

 

The other side of Paris, the street art scene, is important in the manuscript I'm rewriting.  For the last year I have immersed myself in street art and graffiti.  It's exciting stuff, like the manholes on boulevard Saint Michel, where taggers descend into the catacombs -- backpacks full of goodies.

The working title is White Sky of Paris.  See the sky is?  In Paris the sky is often white.

An artist once told me he would mix phtalo green with quinadricone red and add white.  It was the perfect color for the Parisian sky.  I thought, yuck, you can't mix those two colors but he was right.

Paris Today

This is one of my favorite views of Paris

 

The sculpture is by Jean Terzieff.  It's entitled La Femme aux Pommes.  Two apples held apart by naked beauty.  The two bad apples represent the opposing forces before WWII.  

The stone building is the Senat but was once the home of Catherine de Medici and was modelled after the Pitti Palace in Florence.  The skyscraper is the Montparnasse tower.

The photo is from last week.

And so is this, the cherry tree blossoms in Parc des Sceaux just south of Paris. 

 

Under the cherry blossoms everyone was there, like the entire city. It was standing room only.  There were people dressed up like samurai and others in traditional Japanese kimonos playing instruments I've never seen.

This is Paris today.  So much for the May 1st parade.  It's 10°C. 

Paris Today

This is not Paris today, this is Paris everday, the highway A6.  Luckily it is not my everyday ride.  I hate driving, I don’t even own a car and if someone gave me one I’d sell it.   But sometimes you just have to drive one on a highway, out of town to get what you need.

I didn't have a truck like this one parked on Boulevard Richard Lenoir close to scene of the recent terrorist attack on Paris.

Here’s the car I wanted to take.  I'd drive that anywhere.  Even if someone smashed it in the parking lot, it's still hot. Note: two reasons to avoid automobile ownership in Paris: Damage by others and undesired nightime visits.

The A6 is one of the tarmac belts winding around the city of lights.   It won’t take you to the Hotel de Ville or the Pont Neuf but it will take you to IKEA, Orly and beyond. It may never be on Ricks  Steeves's off-the-beaten path but it is a scenic drive if you're into grafitti.  It's a an extra-urban gallery viewable on a flyby.  The taggers risk their lives.  If you've read my posts about the taggers who die to graff, you know.

Climbing to a heaven spot over speeding traffic, probably at the heart of the night, to bomb the back of a traffic sign has to be risky.  I can't imagine the thrill.  It doesn't inspire me.  But I love the work these anonymous artist do to decorate the A6, an otherwise ugly strip of cement.

 The taggers most likely don't have ladders to climb up to those heaven spots.

I wonder how they access these places and to what extremes they are willing to go.  The A6, or any highway, is an extremely dangerous place to stroll along and spray paint.  The anti-sound barrier is covered wall-to-wall in throw-ups,  kilometers of paint.

Even the cement pylons in the meridian between the lanes are bombed.  Graffers  have to cross one of the lanes to get there, I doubt there is an underground passage.

Why do these people risk their lives to graff these ugly places?  I don't know. I've been researching this for over a year.  Graffiti in Paris struck me when I moved here.  I wasn't used to it.  I doubt I ever will be. What makes graffers tick.  I've come to beleive that it is freedom of expression at its extreme. 

Just entering Paris there is a ribbon of tiles that is there to beautify.  It was surely funded by public money.  Taggers left their mark and paste-ups publicize concerts.  When it's gridlock drivers have the time to read the small type.

Even the underpasses burn with graffiti.

This really is Paris.  Can you see the Eiffel tower?  That's avenue d' Ivry.

Is there a highway near you that is covered in graffiti?  Send me photos and tell me where they are.  I'll post them here.