Tag Archives: Life Drawing on Holidays

Académie De La Grande Chaumière and Les Invalides

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Day 86,  Wednesday, November 22, 2023

I have a life drawing session at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and Bob sets off to explore a bit more of Paris.

Today he visits Les Invalides, which was built in 1670 by Louis XIV in order to provide housing and hospital care for wounded soldiers. Today it is a museum, a monument, a mausoleum that contains the tomb of Napoleon and a hospital for war veterans.

This was the tallest building in Paris before the Eiffel Tower was built.  Napoleon’s tomb is located below this golden dome.

Les Invalides is enormous, and was once a city that housed over 4,00 inhabitants.  This arial view gives an idea of its size.

The huge central courtyard, which can be seen in the above photo houses a collection of cannons.This is one of the building entrances that face the central courtyard.  Les Invalides houses huge military museums with thousands of artifacts in its collection.  We visited inside on a previous trip.  It took a whole day to visit the numerous museums dedicated to all things military from ancient to modern times. Today Bob wanders outside, in the gardens and the courtyards.

I spent the afternoon at my beloved Académie de la Chaumiere drawing a lovely model named Inez.  These are five 3 minute poses and one 15 minute.

Three 5 minutes, the portrait was a bit longer but I forgot to mark the time.

Two 20 minute poses

And a 25 minute pose.

I had arranged to meet a friend that I met years ago during my month in Paris.  Ivy met me at the Académie, we drew together and then went for tea at a nearby café. The same café that I visited in 2014!  We had a lovely visit, catching up on the last nine years!
image Finally I headed home where Bob had supper waiting.  Quite a lovely day.

Paris

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Day 81,  Friday, November 17, 2023

We take the rental car back and then take the metro home. The nearest metro station to our bnb is about a 15 minute walk which isn’t too bad. There is artwork on the wall of a building right when we leave the station and… 

More artwork on the wall that runs along the metro line.

Bob decides to stay at home and I head back out to attend a life drawing class at the Academié de la Grande Chaumière.  I change lines at Montparnasse Station and it is very busy!  The metro stations are very well laid out, with lots of signs so they are actually very easy to navigate,

My one disappointment on this trip was how few life drawing sessions I was able to attend in the different cities that we visited.  Covid closed down some of them and they just never opened up again, and sometimes the days that there were sessions didn’t match up with the days that we were in a particular city, or for some reason there just wasn’t a session the  week that we were there.  Now that we are back in Paris I plan to attend as many sessions as I can in the next nine days.

I am a bit out of practice and and a bit tired…today’s drawings weren’t the best but it was still really good to be back at the Grande Chaumière.

Le Grand Cours de Nu…The Big Nude Class!

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Day 16,  Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Bob went to the Nature Museum and I had a quiet morning, resting up after yesterday for my art class tonight.  One of the nice things about Rouen Museums is that there are no entrance fees, they are all free. “The Rouen Natural History Museum is the 2nd most important natural history museum of France after the museum of Paris thanks to its collections richness and diversity (ornithology, ethnography, botany).”  ~from Rouen Tourist Information

More than 800 000 items are gathered there and half of them are exhibited.I walk to the Musée de Beaux Arts for my Grands Cours de Nu, or the Big Nude Class.  It takes place in one of the museums exhibition rooms.  35 people attend this class and there is a male and a female model on two separate stands.  We were encouraged to move between the two models whenever we want.  It was interesting and a different format than other life drawing classes I have attended.  There were four instructors who circulated and offered help as needed.  After the break I found five young women gathered around my sketchbook…seems I have fans of my work!  They asked if they could take photos and wanted to know about my drawings.  The instructors were also gave me very positive feedback.  Lots of fun!
The strange line on the back view is part of a tattoo. I usually don’t draw tattoos, but this one followed the contours of the back so I included it.

Bob meets me outside after the class and we sit for awhile to watch people dancing the Tango outside the Museum before heading home.

Life Drawing in Munich

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Day 53, Thursday, October 17, 2019

I had a relaxing day at our Munich Airbnb and Bob spent the better part of the day sorting out the transit system and where to get tickets.   I went to life drawing in the evening.  The session was at an artist’s apartment, which was really more of a studio than an apartment.  Everyone was very nice and made me feel very welcome.

Here are some photos that were posted on the Meetup page for the session.  Maurice is the artist who hosted the event.  That is him in the centre of the photo.
Here is our model, Bettina, she is very pregnant.  How wonderful!  It has been ages since I have had the chance to draw a pregnant model so this was an unexpected bonus. The drawing on the left is mine. I did a couple sketches to warm up. Then spent about two hours working on this drawing. Bob came to pick me up after the session and on the metro ride home I did a bit more sketching.
This was interesting, the older man with the facial hair was sitting right across the aisle from me and he was only on the metro for one stop so I sketched quickly hoped he didn’t notice that I was sneaking peeks at him. The young man with glasses did notice I was drawing him and he smiled at me, I smiled back and he tried not to smile as I continued sketching.  As he got up to leave I showed him the sketch and he said something in German, then he smiled and said ciao, so I think he liked it.

 

Day 54, Friday, October 18, 2019

We both had a relaxing quiet day.  It is nice to have some down time after seven weeks of holidays.  The big event of the day was going for a little walk to get some groceries.

Michelangelo’s David

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Day 66, Thursday, November 9, 2017

We arrived at the Galleria Dell’Accademia with our tickets for 11:15 and a very kind guard let us in a half hour early.  Our first view of David is pretty wonderful.We walk past Michelangelo’s ‘prisoners’ forever trapped in their unfinished state, on our way to David. There are a lot of people but we take a photo, me and David!

David is even more spectacular than I remember from our visit in 1980, although when we were last here there was no barrier between us and the statue. Of course that was before someone took hammer to David’s left foot!

This 17 foot tall masterpiece is mesmerizing. I sit and draw David. It is still a bit intimidating to sit in public and draw, but people were very kind and very curious about what I was doing. I was aware that there was usually someone standing behind me, watching and taking photos and many people came up to talk to me and ask if it was OK to take a picture. One lady went and got her parents to come meet me and another woman looked at my drawing and said “God Bless You!” Bob wandered off to an exhibit of musical instruments so that I had time to sit and draw. We spend a bit of time going through the rest of the museum. This room full of plaster casts was amazing.There are several more rooms with beautiful iconographic paintings… and a fifteen foot long embroidered altar cloth for the main altar of the Santa Maria Novella Church from 1336. This was the work of one man. I can’t even imagine how long it would take to completely cover such a large cloth in the embroidered stitches.

In the evening I attend a life drawing session at the Florence Academy of Art in the evening. I planned on arriving early to introduce myself and get settled, however our bus was almost 40 minutes late so I arrive about 15 minutes late. That was quite stressful. I decided to ‘christen’ the nice new sketchbook that I bought in Venice.Unfortunately I also had to leave a half hour early because there was going to be a transportation strike starting at 9:00 and it is too far to walk home.  I still enjoyed the session even though I wasn’t all that happy with my drawing.  I met a couple very nice artists, including a woman from Smithers B.C. who was attending a six-week workshop at the Academy.