My partner and I took a quick trip to Paris in early January to see two centennial celebration exhibitions: Surrealism at the Pompidou and Lesage: 100 Years at le19m. I’ll share images from the Lesage exhibition in my next post.

Paris is a city that awakens my senses and reminds me to look and listen deeply. The wet cobblestones, a neon “Sunshine” sign at a cafe, gray stone buildings with ornate details, the patisseries, the melodies of a couple conversing in French behind me, the shaft of light on a narrow street highlighting a lamp post, a curtain fluttering in a window. Right in tune while walking around Montmartre, I caught a photo of a pink ribbon bow someone dropped on the street: https://www.instagram.com/sarahpedlowstudio/ .

In the Surrealism exhibition, I sought out the work by women: Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, Unica Zürn, Claude Cahun, and others. It was so much fun seeing the original “exquisite corpse” drawings, made by drawing a bit and folding it over to hide nearly all of the drawing before passing it to the next person. See last image below.

Marcel Duchamp: an umbrella and a sewing machine

Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise, André Breton: exquisite corpse drawing.

A participant in my extended Drawing With Thread workshop that is in progress now (thank you, Lara!), shared the three questions of Visual Thinking Strategies, developed by Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, who was the director of education at MoMA, in 1991:

What is going on in this image? • What do you see that makes you say that? • What more can you see?

These questions provide a simple way to look and explore a work of art, our own creative work, or whatever we see in our surroundings. What do you see in the works above? I see a lot of play in Surrealist work– dream-like or absurd imagery, spontaneity, and chance.

It is always a good time, but especially now, to ask what is going on, what do I see? Naming is revealing. What does that make me think of? And where would I like to go from here?

A Weekend in Paris + Ways of Seeing Part I