DryStoneGarden

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PalaisRoyaleFount

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These are my drawings from the bike trip. They start with the Palais Royale fountain — my favorite spot in Paris — then the Loire, the Atlantic coast including Noirmoutier and Ile de Re, the Dordogne, Toulouse, the Gran Massif, Nice, and then a couple of sketches of Emilia Romagna and the Langhe in Piedmont. I might return to this post to label the drawings and alternately mock France and sing its praises, but for now I just feel like posting the drawings.

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I did another bike trip in Europe this summer, this time riding from Paris to Bologna. I’ll probably do about a half dozen posts from that trip. This is the first one, a few photos of a green wall on the side of the Musee de Quai in Paris. It’s by Patrick Blanc, the green-haired frenchman who designed the Drew School green wall in San Francisco that I’ve posted about several times: 2011, 2013 and 2016. The Drew School wall was a lot of fun to see the first time, and remains a nice feature even though the plantings haven’t aged exceptionally well. This Paris green wall is in better shape. Most of it is lush and it’s an exuberant element in a city that needs as much vegetation as it can get.

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Two great videos of an old-school American sculptor copying a Canova marble. The videos are part of a National Gallery of Art exhibition of Canova’s clay sketch models. Seems like a fantastic exhibition. Canova’s marbles are so highly finished, it’s great to see his expressive little sketch models. I like Canova, a little bit to my surprise; I’m not especially interested in figurative sculpture or neo-classicism, but I’ve seen a lot of sculpture as I tour around Europe and if I find myself thinking, ‘Hey that sculpture’s really good’, there’s a good chance it will turn out to be by Canova. I especially love the Canova sculpture that Scarpa sited at Castelvecchio, and Scarpa’s room at the Canova museum in Possagno is one of the best sculpture spaces in Europe, but I’ve seen a few others here and there and they have something about them that makes them better than all the other stiff European marbles. The sketch models look great too, and the exhibition seems worth a visit for anyone remotely close to the national gallery.

The exhibition page is here. There’s a great interview with the curator on Modern Art Notes Podcast.