Suivre la lune

Every time when I travel to a place, I always want to create a painting to capture the memory.

When I was in Paris in June, I had a different experience from my previous visits. I spent a lot of time walking the little alleys of the neighbourhood where I was staying, by myself from morning to late evening. I saw them busy during the day, and quiet and empty at night. Just before I was heading home, on my last night in Paris, after I said goodbye to my lovely sister Summer, I walked back to my B&B. It was about a 25-minute walk, and I was listening to a song I had found on my trip: Suivre le soleil (follow the sun)

With this easy-going music in my ears, the walk became very romantic. Just before I arrived at my B&B, I spotted a crescent moon, lined up just so between two buildings of the street. I was a little drunk already, but I managed to get out my phone and take a photo.

Before this moment, I was thinking about painting the Paris skyline, like you would see it from a rooftop, but during the whole trip I didn’t manage to get on any roof terrace. So instead, on that night, I got my Paris view to paint.

Painting it was a bit of a challenge. I don’t like to use black, but I had to, of course, because it was a late-night scene. Controlling the colour was very difficult. Paris doesn’t have white buildings, they’re all cream or sand-coloured. I wanted to create the subtle sense of light and shade, and getting the colour of the buildings right in this night view took a lot of experimentation.

Something a bit old, but the ideas are still new