I had a chance to visit Paris in 2012, and I took full advantage of my time there to visit the major museums, walk the streets, and explore different neighborhoods. One in particular that I wanted to visit was Montmartre, due to its significant role in art history, as the one-time home base for artists such as Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, Monet, Dali, and Degas, among many others.
I was struck by how much graffiti there was, perhaps I had some naive idea that in such an old and historic neighborhood, people wouldn’t tag the buildings, and thinking about that now, that certainly was a naive idea. At any rate, I really enjoyed seeing all of the street art and graffiti, and in some cases, enjoyed it just as much as some of the art I was seeing in the museums.
I have a short clip of some of the graffiti seen in Montmartre, and while I wouldn’t call this extraordinary graffiti, it gives you an idea of what I was seeing and taking in at the time. If you look closely at a face on the wall at the 24 second mark, that was an image that later inspired a painting, which I’ll post below the video.
Here is the painting I mentioned above, titled “Faces from the Streets of Paris,” which I painted in 2016, and is an acrylic on canvas measuring 16 x 20 inches. It’s available for sale, if you’re interested, let me know.
