Praeterita

Me outside the studio building. I didn't go into the Louvre during my recent Paris trip. But I did visit the Musee Delacroix, which is in the house-garden-studio occupied by Eugene Delacroix at the end of his life, between 1857 and 1863. Even if you don't know Delacroix's work that well, or you only know him as the painter of the big historical canvas Liberty Leading the People, it's still worth visiting, for a variety of reasons: You get to see some fine smaller paintings and statues. You see sketches and sketchbooks that give you a glimpse of his working process. You see lots of the personal objects he collected, particularly from his life-changing visits to north Africa. You get to stand inside his studio. And all this without the crush of crowds inside the Louvre. From top: two of Delacroix's painting toolboxes, including a palette; one of his sketchbooks For someone like me, who feel in love with Delacroix's work shortly after I left...

My wife and I flew to Paris on January 2nd, arriving at Charles de Gaulle on the morning of the 3rd -- her birthday. After dropping our suitcases at a VRBO apartment in Montparnasse, we had a quick lunch and a beer at a brasserie around the corner, on the bustling thoroughfare of Rue Daguerre. We slept for a few hours, then celebrated Patty's birthday with a classic French meal at the Cafe du Rendezvous, on the corner of the Place Denfert-Rochereau. In two meals, I made two early mistakes with my rusty French: thinking I ordered a small beer, only to find that I'd really ordered a pint and a half; thinking I'd ordered a medium-to-well done steak, only to see a pool of blood squirt out from it at the first touch of a fork. In each case, by the way, I manfully finished off everything I was given. The next morning I walked about 200 metres to the nearest boulangerie and brought back a warm, fresh baguette for breakfast. The apartment was a well-appointed third-floor walk...

After posting all those extracts from Delacroix's journal, I thought I would talk about one of his paintings in the weekly Meditation on Art. Is this painting in the Louvre? I think I remember seeing it there on my last visit. One thing that the internet can never replace is the experience of seeing a huge canvas like this one, nearly eight feet tall, and all the physical space that this allows the eye to explore.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I   am currently in week 4 of teaching a 15-week class called Journal + Sketchbook: Ways of Seeing. It’s a specialty class offered to students in the Fiction Writing program of Columbia College Chicago, where my wife and co-teacher Patty is an Associate Professor. They are encouraged to use their journals in all fiction writing classes; in this class, I offer the students ways to use drawing to further their writing process.   Patty had the initial idea for this class in 2005. She’s a writer, I’m an artist. A lot of our friends fall into these categories. We then started to notice how closely the two arts were linked in the work of many past artists and writers. Our initial digging around turned up about ten writer/artists and artist/writers who had dipped a toe into, or fully immersed themselves in the other medium as a means of taking a break from their usual practice, and also as a means of expressing similar things in that other medium.   Writer Number 1: Franz Kaf...