PARIS! FRANCE! Part II!

Whenever I travel, my favorite thing to do is to go for a run and explore the area. In fact, it's something that I crave. In 2011 alone I've run in some pretty darn cool places: through the Magic Kingdom at Disney World, around Central Park in Manhattan, up Heartbreak Hill in Boston, and now I can add Paris to that list.

There's something about seeing a place in the early morning light, before it shakes the sleep off and starts to stir, and when that place is Paris it's an order of magnitude more amazing. Let's just say when you start your day with a run up the Champs de Mars and around the Eiffel Tower, it's bound to be a pretty good day.

And it only gets better when you follow that run with a trip to the Musee de l'Orangerie. It came recommended to me by FCA and it was amazing. L'Orangerie was Claude Monet's gift to Paris. Simple. Peaceful. Breathtaking. There are some amazing pieces in the permanent collection downstairs--I minored in Art in college, so I can totally geek out over art, especially the Impressionists. But as amazing as some of those pieces were (Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne), nothing prepared me for the power of The Water Lilies. It wasn't just the paintings themselves, but the entire experience. Two naturally lit beautiful white rooms with four larger than life paintings. I was overwhelmed. Monet, himself, actually painted these pieces. Every single stroke. I sat down on one of the benches in the center of the room to soak it all in and that's when the music started playing. It, like the paintings, was very simple. It started softly and then began to swell. It was impossible for me to not get caught up in it. Even thinking about it now, I'm overcome with emotion. It was a sensory beauty that I've never known. It was so powerful--I was so overwhelmed by the beauty I was moved to tears. I sat there for a very long time, just *being* there.

As I left, I paused in the vestibule, exhaled a deep breath and thought if I lived here, this is definitely where I'd come to find peace and solace and reconnect with myself. When I got home to Seattle, I actually read the museum guide and was so delighted to read that was Monet's intent:

When he donated The Water Lilies to France right after the First World War, Monet wanted to give Parisians a peaceful haven by inviting them to contemplate the infinite before painted nature: "Nerves overwrought by work would relax there just like the relaxing example of those stagnant waters, and for whomever inhabited it, this room would offer asylum for peaceful meditation amidst a flowery aquarium..."

Amazing.

To coin my own little phrase, I'm going to call what happened to me in l'Orangerie my "emotional artburst," and little did I know that was only a precursor for what was waiting for me the next day at Musee d'Orsay (suddenly the retelling of my grand adventure has lost its chronological edge and has taken a turn toward the thematic. What does this mean? I'm feeling particularly verbose about my time in PARIS! FRANCE! The good news, there's going to be a lot more than just Part II. Today's theme: "When LMNT went for a run and then wept openly about art").

Where was I, oh yes, Musee d'O-Oh-my-goodness-rsay. Okay, to say I was excited to go here is a slight understatement. When minoring in Art one takes their fair share of Art History courses. If any of you ever had Art History, you know what I'm talking about when I remember the always darkened classroom, with dual slide projectors advancing you through the different movements: Baroque, Renaissance, Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Futurism, Pop, etc. And slide tests, ugh, slide tests. Painstakingly memorizing the hundreds of works flashed before you in class, the name of the work, the artist, the date, the style, and how you can distinguish that work from others. At the time it was so very tedious and sometimes I had problems telling Gauguin apart from Cezanne (except when Gauguin moved to the islands and assumed a more cubist approach, or was that Cezanne, or Matisse? See?). Well, when I set foot in d'Orsay all those images, the whirring sounds of the projectors, all those facts memorized came flooding back to me. And let me tell you, the slide you memorize is absolutely no match for seeing the real thing. So many of the paintings I had studied, had memorized for the lines, the colors, the subjects, were lining these walls, just inches away. The colors are so much more vibrant, the brushstrokes so much more passionate, the pieces so much more powerful.

D'Orsay is home to a number of Degas' ballerinas (so lovely), more of Monet's notable non-water lily works (you know, the ones you leaned for your slide tests on the Impressionists), and my favorite artist (and my second favorite painting of all-time) Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette. To see this piece in real life was absolutely amazing. I could have stared at it for hours. It was so beautiful it brought me to tears, again. Internets, I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about, or if I'm just some sappy art nerd (possibly both), but being surrounded by all of these works from the masters deeply touched my soul. I can recreate the feeling in my mind, but it starts to take on the feeling of slides being projected in my mind, a really good rendition but nothing like experiencing it in real life.

When I go to an art exhibit I like to take my time and absorb the energy from each piece; I want to attempt to see and feel what the artist saw and felt. And as I made my way through the museum, it became very clear to me that everyone has their own way of appreciating the art. This really played itself out as I was losing myself in a Toulouse-Lautrec--I've never even liked his work all that much (think Can-Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge), but I was transfixed by one of his grand pieces. It was a canvas that was roughly 12 feet by 12 feet. There I am, just amazed, mouth agape, and working on redefining myself as someone who might actually be okay with Toulouse-Lautrec, when a couple I had seen earlier do a light-speed walk through of the Monet room, blaze in front of me. The young woman stopped for a nanosecond, looked the piece up and down and said, "That's kind of cool." The guy she was with, who had already moved into the other room,  asked,"What is?" And she responded, "Oh, just some big painting." I clutched my heart and made an audible gasp for air and then talked myself down out of hysterics. Even though I'm quite convinced that I was winning the award for "most impacted by the 'big paintings,'" I had to remind myself that there is no right or wrong way to experience art (even though deep down I'm pretty sure I was doing it the right way). Plus, the faster they moved out of there, the faster I could go back to being completely absorbed in the art and my emotional artbursts.