Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 26/02/25-27/02/25

Notes for the confused reader: Gabriel (Gabe) is a dog, not a child. This is a collection of pieces from my notebook, typed up; as such, some is written in real-time, some with the benefit of hindsight. It is fragmentary, but so is my mind. If something says (FA) in brackets, read: French Accent.

I have just been to a free exposition in the Académie des Beaux-Arts. It was so typically French, it seemed hard to believe that all the artists were Spanish. The lady at the desk grunted a ‘Bonjour’ as I wandered in, but seemed friendlier the more questions I asked her and the more of an interest I took in the art (the expo was empty. She must have been bored). It helped that the only exhibits I enjoyed looking at were the very first ones, directly in front of her. I tried to see myself through her eyes, and laughed. Some foreign girl – she definitely isn’t French, although she is speaking it like a baby – in a huge multi-coloured puffer jacket stands in the centre of the empty gallery, starring at the painting which fills the left-hand wall. She turns to you, and asks if she might take a photograph. You grunt (although perhaps to you it doesn’t sound like the ‘Bien sûr‘ has got caught somewhere in your bronchial tubes) and watch as she produces her phone from the pocket of her cargo jeans and steps backwards, getting the light to fall just-right. I took two photos, and wandered around the rest of the exhibit, seeing endless stone-work creations made to look like parts of women, and tilting my head in an attempt to understand a dimly-lit oil painting of a woman with demons (or were they just men?) sucking at her lips, her breast, and from between her legs. I tried to see if it looked better upside-down: it didn’t. The painting was titled: ‘Entry into Paradise’, and was meant to represent the loss of the soul. Society attacks women is how I interpreted its undertones: it sucks us dry. We must be empty in order to enter Paradise. Perhaps the latter is the remnants of my Theology degree attempting to make sense of modern art: with what body will they come? Paul’s letter to the Corinthians swims in front of my eyes.

The photographs I took are of two paintings: the first I liked best because it is a snapshot of a cafe, and looking at it felt like all my world, and all the artist’s world, and all reality were colliding. The exhibition was called ‘Kaléidoscope’, symbolic of our tumbling fragments of lives, interconnected and distorted, which revolve around past memories and future desires and force the individual into the collective no matter how much they may resist. Groups sat outside a cafe, entirely distinct, entirely their own; while one boy drank a coke from a cardboard fast-food chain cup, another man was eating his morning fried-egg, although he had a three-quarters empty pint of beer sitting to the right of his plate. Two girls sat behind tall glasses of champagne, oh-so clearly in the middle of a words-can’t-get-out-fast-enough gossip. (They wore boots, and one was leaning across the table in excitement, pressing her hand against the other’s knee as though assuring her the rumors were true). A small dog lies on the pavement, under a chair; perhaps that is really why I liked this painting best: Gabriel stared woefully out of the frame, somehow completing this picture-imperfect cafe scene just by his unnoticed presence. It is what I see, every day, outside every cafe, in every street: it is humanity (defined by a dog), drinking, laughing, being – not always living, but being – just as they are. Creatures in the wild. With the tamed beast, the dog, at their booted heels.

The second photograph was undeniably of the better painting. But I prefer the first. Sometimes art is a sacrifice for taste.

27/02/25:

I went out to find a Paris-Brest and was entirely unsuccessful. Instead, I found a carrot cake with a chocolate praline ganache (they seem to be all the rage at the moment), and a man who was just SO that I wish it weren’t rude to ask people for their photograph in the street. (I was disappointed by the carrot cake: it cost an extortionate 6 euros, and I had really wanted a Paris-Brest. I was falsely wooed by the handsome curly haired man who told me to go for the cake over the pain au chocolat. I must learn to stop spending money in boulangeries for the sake of pretty eyes and heads full of curls. They’re probably working on commission). I have never met a man whom I have so much wanted to paint. In all likelihood, I have never met a man who so much wanted to be painted. (In case he ever reads this, it was not pretentiousness which causes me to think he’d like a portrait of himself, more the fact that I got the distinct impression he’d find it all very amusing. He produces films; an artist, therefore, in a way that I’d like to be). He was like that; he knew who he was. Who he was (in my eyes) I will sketch as follows:

(Let me set the scene: Palais-Royal, around 10:20am, Thursday morning. One large female Doberman (purple lead, matching her owner, but more of that in a minute). One small Cockalier (tan-leather lead, matching his owner’s sunglasses, but that was unintentional and far less impressive). One man, en route to a meeting. One girl (although since the French now refer to me as a “Madame” perhaps I am officially a woman?), en route to her breakfast (which was to be disappointing, but that doesn’t matter). The dogs begin to dance around each other, the small one terrified, the large one friendly. Their leads get mixed up, and wrap around the girl’s white jeans). Normally when describing a character, I begin with their hair, their face, their eyes. Expressions precede clothes. In this case, clothes were so much part of his self-expression that, though he wore them without any self-consciousness at all (they were simply an extension of him, unremarkable and necessary — streaking in the Palais-Royal still being widely frowned upon), they must be remarked upon first.

He wore a lilac and white striped collarless shirt; he wore a thick-knit purple cardigan, whose buttons only began halfway down his torso; he wore chestnut coloured corduroy trousers, with lilac socks on his feet which so perfectly matched both his dog’s lead and his shirt that I wondered vaguely if he employed a personal tailor to make all three, and he wore brown suede loafers on his feet. (Anyone who knows me well can tell you my thoughts about brown suede loafers: they are best expressed in a feeling somewhere between Bridget Jones’ “ding dong” and the less refined line from Top Gun “Take me to bed or lose me forever!”). Anyway, I have no desire for this man to take me to bed (a good thing, too, since he has both a wife and a baby, though he did tell me stories about sneaking girls into the locked gardens of the Palais-Royal in his bachelor days), I merely wish to paint him. It is of no importance, either, that I cannot really paint.

His hair, now that his clothes have been described, is dark, a little long, and his face has traces of stubble and good-living. I’d put him at the upper end of his thirties; it doesn’t matter. He told me where was best to let Gabe off the lead, and gave me the number of his dog-walker. He told me where was best to buy cheese in the whole of Paris, and he swore a lot about “that b*tch Emily” who all the tourists come to see. He told me he lives in the Palais-Royal – either here or in Venice – and that he runs an advertising agency for luxury brands (Louis Vuitton has asked him to launch their dog campaign; I showed him Gabriel’s rip-off jumper and we laughed). He told me his friend used to work at VogueFrance, but has now left to start his own magazine; he told me that if I want to stay in Paris, he could put us in touch. I took his number.

I want to stay in Paris. I want to be put in touch. And, one day, I want to wear lilac in the Palais-Royal and exude so much self-knowledge that somebody wants to paint me.