Jo Myers-Walker's Blog

Outside Dame Cakes building
on rue St. Romain

We enjoyed lunch at Dame Cakes tea shop (link to Google-translated page), housed in the former workshop of Ferdinand Marrou (link to Google-translated page), an artist in ironworks who created the tower on the Cathedral.

Shopkeepers in Rouen are proud of their products, truly individual like a signature of who they are. We say Bonjour and so do they when we come into their shop. They are very respectful and do not hard-sell but let you absorb the amazing displays. When we leave they say Au revoir, or good-bye and have a nice journey. Much grace and you always speak quietly, especially in a cafe — no hurrying about, but enjoying the down time.

I had my first hat fitting with a delightful milliner on rue St. Nicolas (La Boutique De Maman), and had a wool hat made to cover my ears for winter. She even gave me a beret in trade for a painting!

The hat designer at work
   

An inviting selection
at the milliner’s shop

Replica of a Viking runestone
next to St. Ouen’s Church, Rouen

Near the Church of St. Ouen, a replica of a runestone commemorates Rouen’s Viking history. Vikings (some of my ancestors maybe?) took over the city of Rouen many times and went home in the winter. Then they got smart and appreciated the soil and easier climate, and settled here.

The Church of St. Ouen, a Gothic building started in the 14th century, is well-supplied with gargoyles to watch over things. Gargoyles seem to be everywhere around Rouen — on St. Ouen’s, Rouen Cathedral, the hall of justice — pretty scary at night!

View of St. Ouen’s with flying buttress outlined against the sky

Those projections along the walkway are a row of gargoyles, keeping an eye on passers-by

Water lily pond
at Giverny
   

Gardener cleaning out dead leaves. Monet kept the garden very pristine for his painting.

These photos are from Claude Monet’s house and gardens in Giverny, where he lived and painted for many years, and his and wife Alice’s children played. He would paint in his boat en plein air and trees were planted for different kinds of light settings. When we visited the fragrance was wonderful, and the bees and spiders were free. It was like everything was caressing the atmosphere, genial and at peace.

I enjoyed the bright-colored rooms of Monet’s house, with numerous Japanese prints whose influence you can see in his work. His home was filled with the works of Cézanne, Pissarro, and many others in the Impressionist movement. I wonder if he traded like me with other artists.

Monet’s house

Giverny has chickens!

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!
(Links are to Google translations)

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”), 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