Our AirBnB was a cute little apartment on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter. Unfortunately our meet-up with the host coincided with the Gay Pride event. One half of the city was literally cut off from the other. You couldn’t get the to the Left Bank from the Right Bank without going out of the city to circumvent it. Needless to say we were en retard. Our host was too. He was just as stuck, and had not cleaned the apartment after the last guests who had left earlier that morning. It was a bit of a fiasco, but there was a slight breeze and lots of tea.
Here are our neighbors across the way.
They all look quite decorous and I’m sure they are. This is hardly an inexpensive part of town (our building belonged to the “poor” neighbors). However, below us were a multitude of restaurants, bars, French drowning their World Cup sorrows, and Pride participants celebrating an astonishing turn-out. There was a lull in the noise sometime around 2 am (presumably the hardiest had passed out or stumbled home), only to resume at full force sometime around 4 am. There was singing. There were conversations that could be heard in….let’s say Nice, just to keep the theme going. There were things that might have been declarations of love or war.
The street sweepers were out extra early that morning and the town was covered in glitter. On the Metro the following morning, there were a number of spangled celebrants who clearly had missed their stop several times, most of them listing sideways. People were kind, propping them up when they threatened to collapse in ball on the floor. One group of young ladies was serenading the train, although they hadn’t decided on the same song. It was rather like listening to Ariana Grande singing five songs simultaneously – an entire album in one.
Yesterday, we had strolled Montmartre looking at the work of would-be artists and a few with genuine talent. It was almost all very sanitized and tourist. Today, I was in search of something very particular. Early on in my Instagram career, I had searched widely for creative people doing unique work. I came across the artist C215, whose name is Christian Guemy. He is a street artist who has been doing graffiti for more than 20 years. However, in 2006 he did his first public work using a stencil. He hand cuts the stencils from his own drawings and his work can be seen throughout Paris. Much of his work depicts people ( migrants, the homeless, notable historical figures, people in the news), he is also known for his collection of cats and butterflies. He does work on both canvas and wood as well.
On this trip I was hoping to see some of his work. Not more than a block from the AirBnB, I found these.
Guemy is also known for his religious work, and has done spectacular work for churches. He spent time studying Caravaggio, among others and seems to have a style that is genuinely artistic and unique, and interesting blend of traditional and edgy, political and spiritual.