soleilisme

I’ve been wanting to paint more lately, but I wasn’t inspired by anything. I didn’t have a great concept, there were no photos I wanted to interpret, it was raining outside and made me kind of uncreative. But Justin nonchalantly suggested I should try painting still life. I think most of the time still life paintings are boring. But I thought to myself, what the heck… I have nothing else better to get into.

I looked around the apartment, found these blood oranges and sliced them up. I made 2 small paintings of 4.5×6″ of acrylics on essentially really thick paper.

Here’s a quarter of the blood orange.

Here’s a more lateral view, showing the various slice skins.

Once I was done, I ate them.

Do you ever feel like you need something and have a perfect idea of how it should look like or how it should work, but you can’t find anything like it stores? That’s what happened to me when I decided I needed an earring rack. Somewhere to hang my earrings on, instead of having them all tangled in a box. It drove me nuts!

And so I started looking around in various shops and online, without finding anything that looked like what I had in mind. Maybe I didn’t look in the right places? You tell me.

Basta! (”that’s it!” in Italian) I decided to make my own. After a few concept trials (in my head) I decided to go with a simple electrical wire and small wood dowel design.

I made a basic drawing not forgetting the vital elements to beat gravity, I took some fairly small pliers, a wire cutter and on I went! Trying to figure out how the whole thing would stand and stay standing, with my tongue sticking out like a kid, stepping away and coming back to it with fresh ideas every few minutes, like an artist.

It’s far from being perfect! It’s got some funky details and is *almost* very straight.

But hey, now I can eyeball, pick up and put back my earrings neatly in seconds.
I feel like I invented something.

This past weekend we girls (Krista, Marcia, Joy and I) went to the Secret Garden Tea House in San Francisco. We sipped on delicious tea and ate tiny food. It was delightful! It made me want to wear my British accent and get that pinky up there!

Here are a few photographic illustrations of the experience…

Yummy savory treats

The tea pot’s face

The pouring in action

Me trying (but not succeeding very well) to be girly. Courtesy of Joy

Note to English speakers: The French would say I have “la bouche en cul de poule“, which means “my mouth like a chicken’s ass”. This often refers to how snobby people sort of pinch their lips together and push them forward (kinda like Zoolander) because they’re uptight, which is exactly what I was trying to portray. Don’t ask me why the French language associates it to a poultry’s rectal orifice. See? I’m just not good at being girly, here I am making language comparisons involving chicken’s buttholes on an originally-intended-to-be-lovely blog post.

More photos on Flickr!

Part of my family’s origins are from Hungary. We lately learned that Barbara Spitzer, a French film maker, who seems to be related to my family, made a documentary on her quest in finding her Hungarian roots… which is our roots too!

With my Dad, we’re trying to find an online version of the film named “Ce qu’il en reste“, with no luck so far. The closest I got was finding an excerpt of the film. You can find it here or here (it requires Real Media Player… and the ability to either speak Hungarian or read French subtitles). There’s also a wonderful blog post here quoting her talking about the film. Again, it’s in French, but Google Translate does a pretty good job at, well, translating.

My great uncle, Peter, is actually going to meet with her in Paris this spring. We might get juicy information on genealogy and maybe a DVD? I can’t wait to get more information!

In the past few months I have been a little more involved in online community sites like Facebook, MySpace and Copains d’Avant.

It turns out that MySpace really turns me off. The layouts are messy, and even if it’s great for some people and even some artists, there’s just too much noise on that site for me.
However, Facebook and Copains d’Avant really have been working for me because I ended up finding a bunch of people in France I used to go to school with. From 2nd grade to college. It’s so cool!

I got into Facebook because of work. We were running ads I needed to check on a couple of applications (man what a burden!). But I wouldn’t have signed up unless I had a real purpose, like the work one. Anyhow, one day, out of the blue, one of my good high school friends writes something on my wall. And I was floored! I was jumping up and down thinking how crazy this is and how happy I am to see this girl’s face after so many years. Turns out, she hasn’t changed much.

So, I thought to myself, if she found me, there probably are many other people I know out there! It actually never occurred to me before that French people could be using Facebook. Well, they are!
I found 10 people so far… That’s 5 from elementary school, 4 from middle school and 1 from high school.

The other online community I got into is Copains d’Avant. A French site meant to link up “friends from before” or “friends of the past”. You can say which schools you went to during what years and it pulls a list of all other members with the same criteria. So cool! The interface isn’t quite as nice as Facebook (which is not that great itself), but sure enough, I found people… 9 of them.
3 from elementary school, 2 from middle school, 3 from high school and 1 from college.

Let’s do the math here. Number of people I haven’t heard from in 10 years or more and just appeared on my screen lately and who I know from:
ElementarySchool — 8
Middle School — 6
High School — 4
College — 1   Update 2/3/08: 2

All these people have played a significant role in my younger years and just the thought of perhaps seeing some of them next time we go to France, just gives me shivers and happy chills.

… apart from enjoying their wonderful company? Laying on the inflatable mattress and let my weight deflate it.
Feeling my body be consumed by this mass of moldable plastic is highly meditative. I come out of this experience refreshed, with a big smile on my face and the desire to do it again.

So please, if ever you come to our house for a night or two, let me deflate the bed, please! Or OK, I can let you try it, but I’ll have to re-inflate it to get to go on the ride again :)

Today, I was still feeling sick and decided not to go to a party I was invited to, in order to keep my germs for myself. I then had to create projects to keep me entertained. So I did the dishes, I put my pile of clothes away, I entered some pictures in my genealogy tree and I painted.

I thought of a concept a while back, not claiming to be unique, but at least interesting to me. I’m just starting to explore it…
Here’s the concept: apply a layer of paint and put bits of tape on it. Let dry. Apply another layer of paint and more bits of tape on it. Let dry. Apply another layer of paint, etc… So that when all is dry and you peel off the tape, it reveals the layers you “saved” with the tape.

Here’s my first attempt: a very spiky flower. I want to make more!

PS: I need to take pictures of my “art” with a tripod!!