Today was a lovely day to go biking in Paris. Late afternoon, my 9-year old son and I took off on our bikes to a new burough of Paris, near the Seine enbankments, in search of an artist hang-out, called "Les Frigos", housed in an old building used as freezers by the French national railway decades ago.
You can track our ride on our way there, and back.
We stopped a few times along the way to grab a few pix, and spent 2 hours visiting with really great artists (I liked Sasha, the musical artists, the guys in the music studio, the chat with some painters - really nice, a color-glass artist on the ground floor, etc.). All floors were accesible to us only by a very heavily decorated staircase, but they have lifts as well. About 200 artists work there, but expose and sell all over. It's really peculiar to have such an unconformist bulding, setting, decoration, surrounded by extremely modern buildings (banks mainly).
All 111 pictures taken with a Leica M9, using a Leica Summicron 35mm f/2. Almost no post-processing today; the few that have some processing is using Aperture 3.x, with plugins from Nik Software (Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro). All pix are fully downloadable, but with my ususal Creative Commons licence : BY NC SA.
I can't believe I waited until the very last day to visit an expo next to my office, about my favourite painter... Too much work I suppose.
I missed the Guggenheim expo in 1995 in NYC (was there the year after), managed to spend 2 hourd in London about 5 years ago for at the Hayward Gallery for a great expo.
This one was a bit smaller, focusing on the creative process of the painter. Interesting, but not a great one. Some great masterpieces nevertheless.
Well worth however the 8 eur I paid to get in. And amusingly, I bumped into another well known web 2.0 entrepreneur in there :)
And hence when I see a great site design, I notice. Check this one (congrats on launching it) vs. this one. Which one do you prefer ? I think the Pikeo team (hurrray to Céline, Sean and Pascale) did a GREAT job on graphical design. Williams-Sonoma has also been a long time favourite website design and furthermore, a great job in graphical identity: their shops, brochures, wbe sites all have the same look & feel.
Anyone can point me to a portfolio of great design work on the web ? I'd love to have a look. Or links to sites you just like.
Tonight, as I was looking into the latest submissions from our beta users, I discovered some amazing animations with Sand.
I had never seen this, nor heard about them. It seems it's a huge trend, and these are live performances.
I asked the person whether I could reblogged, and he agreed to, although I'm not sure who owns the rights to these videos (please let me know whether I'm infringing here).
As I was coming home last night, I stopped by an art dealer near my place: I've always liked sculpture, bronzes in particular.
I had never really heard of the Jacques Le Nantec, but his work is really nice, with lots of attention to detail, and a huge influence of his libido of course.
I took a series of pictures of the sculptures on sale that I liked most. As with any sculpture, you have to look at them often, from different angles. Here's my Flickr set.
I attended a great private auction diner tonight in honour of a nice association (thanks Christophe for the opportunity to attend). Galienni, a French artist that I was happy to recommend to the event did a great performance = painting the work of art live (you can see all pictures of the process on Flickr).
His painting was eventually sold for 2300 euros, almost doubling his last price of 1200€ for one of his paintings at the Drouot auction house. Well done Stéphane!
I'll let him explain the meaning & symbology (beautiful) of the painting on his own blog at http://www.galienni.com.