Mucha on my mind

How was your Easter weekend? Mine was quiet and laid-back, made all the better by the company of a wonderful guest from home.

Just one last Prague post before I move on. I couldn't leave Prague without having paid a visit to the Mucha Museum, which houses the major works of one of my favorite artists, Alphonse Mucha. 

One of my favorite coloring books when I was a kid was my Art Nouveau stained glass coloring book from Goodwill Bookstore. To this day, I love Art Nouveau, and Mucha is Art Nouveau. 

Dance (public domain)

When I started working at GMA, I considered it destiny that I ended up in an office where the glass walls of the pantry were plastered with a huge mural of Mucha's Dance (above). I managed to transmit my Mucha fixation to my work partner Charlie, an insanely talented art director who also tended to obsession. Mucha's Dance became the jump-off point for a slew of Art Nouveau-inspired outdoor and print materials for a big account that took over our lives. I wish I kept copies of Charlie's work, it was all so gorgeous. 

Mucha's work is not high art, but it is beautiful. Though he painted, most of his work was fairly commercial: from theater posters to advertisements for champagne and milk to biscuit tins. Many examples of his work, like Spring, Grapes, the poster for Lorenzaccio, and The Slav Epic (all of which I saw at the museum) today are in the public domain.

It was amazing to come face to face with works that I had only seen as small pictures in books, and realize that they are actually HUGE. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed inside the Mucha Museum. So I had to settle for taking photos outside. That day, I was in "simple girl" mode with the Longchamp bag and ponytail, although I would hope the Marni for H&M top elevates it somewhat.

I took home a few postcards of my favorite works. 

My favorite souvenir, though, was this handmade notebook. I love notebooks, so this was perfect for me. But it was also very unusual in that it harbored a few hidden treasures. Click on through to peek inside...

See it, do it

I just found a collage that I made at the beginning of spring, when I first started getting back into my creative groove. I was done with it, but not quite.. until I saw these tiny hot air balloons in a magazine ad and decided to toss them into the mix at the very last minute.

Six months later...

Coincidence? Or is it just what happens when you put something out into the universe? You tell me. I'm just glad it worked out this way. As R. Kelly sings: "If I can see it, then I can do it!"

From Borghese to Trevi

From a superturbocharged first day, our level of activity slowed down with each passing day we spent in Rome. We became less ambitious with each day's itinerary, hitting the snooze button more times and dawdling longer and longer in our blessedly cool, thick-walled, marble-tiled apartment. 

So by the time our fourth day rolled around, it was nearly lunchtime by the time we set off for Villa Borghese, the sprawling gardens-turned-public park that once belonged to the powerful and wealthy Borghese family. We stopped for lunch at the Piazza del Popolo.

The Galleria Borghese was the "party house" of Scipione Borghese, a nephew of Pope Paul V. Borghese used his wealth and influence to amass a truly stunning collection of art. I was excited to finally see the works of artists I had only seen in books, such as Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael and Rubens.

Tickets for the museum need to be reserved well in advance over the phone. An Italian colleague of Marlon's had helped us call the Galleria Borghese to reserve tickets for that day's 1 to 3pm time slot. The administration is strict and will shoo everyone out after the allotted 2 hours are over.

The Galleria Borghese is simply jawdropping from the first step in. Unfortunately, photography is forbidden—but if it wasn't, I'd be all over it with my camera.

Scipione Borghese was one of the earliest patrons of master sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose signature is all over Rome. It was in Galleria Borghese that I came face to face with the true genius of Bernini. His Apollo and Daphne is, without exaggeration, the most beautifully sculpted piece of art I've ever seen in my life. I must have spent half an hour just looking at it, and could have easily stayed longer. 

His Pluto and Proserpina in the next room is completely different, but just as captivating.

Photos from the Galleria Borghese website—they simply don't do them justice!

After our museum visit, Marlon and I decided to just take it easy and cool off under the shade of the trees around the Villa Borghese. 

Our curiosity was piqued by the small, funny "tandem bike" buggies that rattled by us every now and then. "That looks like fun!" Marlon said. So we had to give it a try.

The buggies turned out to be electric riscios (rickshaws), that, along with regular bikes, can be rented on an hourly basis. 

Marlon and I rattled around the park for a good 45 minutes or so until we spotted something so tempting, we just had to park our riscio, get down and enjoy it.

A public fountain! After four days of broiling heat and constant walking, I can't tell you what a treat it was to perch on the lip of this fountain and dip my poor footsies into this clear, ice-cold water. It is a miracle of Rome that the water in its fountains is always shockingly cold no matter how hot it gets.

I was obviously not the only one who felt this way. But I just couldn't bring myself to take it to the next level!

Refreshed and rejuvenated, we returned the riscio and headed to the Piazza Spagna, or the famous Spanish Steps, starting all the way at the top for a sweeping view...

... stopping for a photo op, naturally...

... until we ended up all the way at the bottom, with the rest of the 48,000 tourists and their mothers who were there. #mobbed

Everyone was taking photos of this fountain just because it was there, so I did too. #sheep

Just a few streets away was the great granddaddy of all fountains, the Trevi. I didn't expect it to be so... BIG!

The Trevi Fountain was completely mobbed, too. The crowd was overwhelming, so I just found an empty spot to sit down for a while before even taking a single picture. I may have lost count of how many people did the "tossing a coin into the fountain" pose, but I give all them an O for Originality!

Night at the Musei

Just for peak season this year (Easter till early fall), the Vatican Museums opened their doors to the public on Friday nights. What used to be a very expensive privilege became a brilliant way for Marlon and I to beat the debilitating daytime heat and experience the Museums in an unusual way.

So I signed us up for a two-hour night tour of the highlights with an official Musei Vaticani guide. At €24, tickets from the Musei Vaticani website itself were the cheapest ones around. We were lucky to nab tickets only days before our visit.



Our official Vatican guide, Alexandra, was not only extremely knowledgeable and thorough, she also had amazing voluminous hair despite looking rather dead on her feet at 10pm. 

The Musei Vaticani house the vast art collection of the Catholic Church, a treasure trove that's been amassed over centuries.

The magnitude of the collection is mind-boggling in itself. The Museum's various galleries (only some of which are open at night) hold everything from ancient sculptures and priceless paintings, to more unusual things like maps and tapestries. 

Not all the art was centuries old. We only just breezed through the contemporary section, but I glimpsed large-scale works by the likes of Dali and Matisse, among many others. 

If you think the art is overwhelming, the decoration and ornamentation of the galleries themselves will make your head spin. By the end of the evening, I literally felt like my eyeballs were going to pop out (it's a very... interesting feeling). There is art in every possible nook and cranny, masterpieces everywhere from floor...

... to ceiling.

My friend Jec asked, "Is it more mind-boggling than Versailles?" I snorted. The Vatican Museums make Versailles look positively minimalist.

And yes, I had to wrestle with that a bit. After my very emotional afternoon at St. Peter's, thinking about the value of the art and—oh, you know this one—how much good it can do for the suffering of the world brought me crashing down. 

I know any of us in such a position to amass all these these treasures would keep them for as long as we possibly could. But this is an all too human instinct from a Church that professes to be divine. I wonder if a Musei Vaticani auction is something we will ever see in our lifetime. 

Since they are not exactly easy to sell, the masterpieces that are fixed to the buildings themselves are somewhat easier to think about. 

These are some of the Vatican Museums' greatest treasures: ceilings and walls adorned with frescoes by Raphael.

I was glad to have my wide-angle lens, but these pictures cannot even come close to doing these ceilings justice.

How Raphael brought theology, history and even mathematics and philosophy together in his art was simply genius.

At the point where my eyeballs were about to fall out of their sockets, we entered the world's most famous chapel with the world's most famous ceiling. I managed to snap this photo before I saw the sign forbidding photography. 

It's just as well that photography is not allowed; sometimes we forget to experience things with our own eyes, and not through a viewfinder or lens.

So I just threw my head back and stayed that way, eyes glued to the ceiling, for about 20 whole minutes. I tried to drink in as many details as I could. I simply didn't want to forget. And I don't think I ever will.

Peony in pencil

I never liked peonies before. I always associated them with Chinese paintings and bad tattoos. I'm not a fan of either.

www.hubpages.com

But ever since I first found them in the market here in late April, they've become my favorite flower. I love the huge blossoms (statement blossoms?), especially the ones that are colored intense shades of fuschia and coral. And I love how the petals don't dry up or simply drop off, but fade slowly to white, each blossom at a different pace. Death by ombre, what a way to go.

The only thing that I could conceivably hate about peonies, I discovered during my last Monday sketching session. And that is the fact that they are a real b*tch to draw.

I almost gave up a couple of times. Now I know why the Chinese have stylized their shapes, otherwise these would never make it into traditional motifs. The repetition would have driven the illustrator (at least, a lesser one like myself) totally nuts.

Luckily, we have scanners and printers today. So, working with some fluorescent papers I bought for my Singapore job hunt more than three years ago, I reproduced the sketch I made to create my own peony print. I used Mod Podge for the first time and had awful wrinkles everywhere. Thankfully, most of them disappeared with a little ironing.

The fluo on black kind of reflects how I've been feeling about having these flowers at home: they were the only visual bright spots for me during the first two dark, dismal weeks of "summer." Summer, I'm beginning to suspect, is a figment of the imagination over here, with as tenuous a connection to reality as corporatese, or marketing jargon. 

Ah, enough about this fictitious summer. If I can't get it outside, then I'll just have to find some way to enjoy it in my home. In petals or on paper, by nature's hand or by my own.

Watercolor lessons

I've always been into drawing and painting. The first medium I ever learned to use was watercolor. My mom hired an artist to give me and my sister watercolor lessons when I was about 9 or 10. He was a really precise, uber-detailed kind of painter who came to the house once a week. We would move a big desk from my mom's study outside onto the front lawn, where he taught me how to mix colors and manipulate water and brush on paper. 

Over the summer, I produced two obsessively detailed watercolor paintings: a still life with fruit that still hangs in my mom's house, and one of unicorns (another lifelong interest of mine) in a cave. He liked to go over my mom's art books to find "inspiration", and the unicorns' cave resembled Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks in quite a few places. 

Since then, though, I've kind of... lost the knack for watercolors. I started getting really impatient if I couldn't finish something in one sitting. There are ways to pull off really quick watercolors, but because that wasn't my tutor's style, I never learned how.

It was a flyer posted on the bulletin board of the Van Beek art supply store on the Weteringschans that led me back to watercolors. Penny Johnson, an artist based in Haarlem, was offering watercolor sessions at her studio. After trading a few emails with Penny, I signed up for the last of the Tuesday afternoon sessions before her summer break.

The city of Haarlem is about 20 minutes by train from Amsterdam. A lot of Marlon's colleagues actually live there because of the lower property costs, which makes it a good alternative to living in Amsterdam. Since I was running late (as usual) for my first lesson, I didn't get to look around much. 

I went back with Marlon the following Saturday to walk around the center and explore a bit more. It seems like a pretty town, a lot smaller and quainter than Amsterdam, with not as many tall buildings and far less tourists (which is nice). Still, I haven't quite decided if it's a city we'd want to live in further down the road.

Penny, a late-middle aged British lady with a brisk and cheery manner, welcomed me warmly with a cup of coffee and my art materials for the day. I immediately felt at home in Penny's studio. It was bright, with high ceilings and enough work space for a small group, with heaps of interesting odds and ends piled together in small vignettes... a charming kind of clutter.

I liked her little collections of ceramics and glass bottles, all ready to be captured by paintbrush and water. I suspect I'll be like this someday. I already have a starter collection of wine bottles on the kitchen counter, which I kept just because I found the colors so pretty.

One wall was covered with cards, posters and various bits of paper showing different styles of watercolor. Some were loose and fast, with luminous colors bleeding together; others were more precise and detailed. These two pieces in particular caught my eye, and I snapped a photo with my iPhone. I would be more than happy if I could learn to paint like this.

Penny, and the two ladies who were here students that afternoon, stopped. "What are you doing?" Penny asked. "Are you taking photographs?" Then they all started talking about picture-happy people, how this tourist on one woman's cruise couldn't stop snap-snap-snapping away, blah blah blah.

I didn't realize that taking photos could be annoying to others. Is it just the generation gap showing here? I didn't want to be one of those "annoying types" so I meekly put away my phone, and resolved not to take my DSLR out of my bag for the rest of the afternoon...

... which was devoted to painting, of course. Penny started me off with a relatively easy project: getting a feel for the wet-on-wet technique, or painting on wet paper.  Wet paper makes the paint (which is also loaded with water) blend and bleed together, so it's for quick, loose work; vastly different from the style of my first tutor, but perhaps more suited for the less deft and more impatient me.

I surprised myself by starting out... cautiously. Timidity is not something I normally expect of myself, but there I was dabbing tentatively at the paper, producing pale, washed-out landscape. Penny took one look at my work and pronounced: "Color, my dear. You need more color. Let's put it this way: the paints are free."

By the end of the two and a half-hour session, I had gained a measure of boldness with my colors and strokes. I was re-learning how to see things differently, to look closer at light versus dark, since with watercolors you start with the lightest colors first, before building up the darker shades. I was beginning to learn how to be patient with mixing colors to achieve just the right shade, and not to settle for what I thought it looked like, out of impatience. And I was remembering how to just... play. All of these things that I thought I'd forgotten were reawakening in me. 

And I have to say: I kind of like it.

Round and round we go

One of the smaller museums that I've missed on my previous Paris trips was the Musee L'Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries. It was an oversight that I was happy to correct on this visit.

Marlon, Gutsy and I were welcomed by Rodin's The Kiss right outside the museum door. It's the third I've seen, after the ones at the Musee Rodin and the sculpture garden in Martigny.

The centerpieces of the Musee L'Orangerie are a pair of tranquil white oval-shaped rooms that house Monet's famous paintings of water lilies, Les Nympheas.

Six of about 250 paintings by Monet on the same theme are housed here.

Something about the scale of the paintings, or maybe the peace and beauty of its subjects, made the mood in these round halls somewhat contemplative.

The visitors remind me of people watching films on a panoramic screen... except it's not the images that change, but what you're thinking about them.

I was just glad that the rooms were cool and quiet, making them a perfect place to hide from the hot sun. I'm learning to love it when the sun is out, but too much still annoys me. Yes, I'm still Asian.

Downstairs was a collection of mostly impressionist paintings, including works from Cezanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Monet and others. The one I liked the most was this portrait of Coco Chanel by the artist Marie Laurencin.

It was annoyingly hot outside, so we scrapped our plan to go walking around the gardens after the museum. Instead, we repaired to Laduree, which was just a few minutes away.

I'd been to Laduree once before with Gutsy and Tria, in 2006. But I couldn't afford more than just a coffee back then. Not even one of Laduree's famed macarons.

This time, I had a lime-vanilla sorbet... with a fleur de sel (salted caramel) macaron. Both of them were absolutely divine: so light and sweet, flavorful without being overpowering.

Marlon immortalized my first bite of Laduree's famous macarons on camera. Each bite was definitely a mmm-mmm-mmmmoment. 

In addition to the fleur de sel, Gutsy and I also shared a pistachio and an orange blossom macaron.



After the oval rooms at L'Orangerie, I guess you could say that round shapes were the theme of the day!