Marie-Antoinette Girard (left), Agnès Dévé (right), and Adeline Gouarné (front) paint in the same studio, and invited us to come back and work with them!

Last weekend nearly 200 artists in a variety of media opened their studios for the fourth annual Visites d’ateliers d’artistes (“Visits to artists’ studios”; link is to a machine-translated page), a chance to talk with the artists and see their artwork and where it was created.

Bonnie and I had several adventures on the way to finding the painters we’d decided to visit. One studio near our apartment was off of a tiny street or walkway where no horseman could ride. In another area we found buildings numbered haphazardly, with the odd numbered 30’s across the street from the even numbered 40’s. The artists were gracious and enthusiastic, and though our French was more like a pidgin mix of speech, art is the universal language.

(Many thanks to Bonnie Dix for co-writing this post, and taking the photos!)

The charming Francis Caudron, an artist in many media whose work includes calligraphy-like figures

Gracious host and acrylic painter Lionel LaGrange, in his studio right on the Seine