Charcuterie by any other name

Purchased from the artist across the street from Les Deux Magot in Paris many, many years ago.

I have bought art on the streets several times. Sometimes, it was not so unusual--for instance, in Central Park on a lovely warm day near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One such painting purchased on the hoof and on the spur of the moment still hangs in my house. It is a small print of a very Japanese-style original watercolour. Another work, purchased the same day--elongated horses with elongated riders dressed for a fox hunt--is long gone. Neither cost more than 20 bucks, although they were both admirable in their way.

And then there are the charity purchases. On came to hand on the beach at the end of Duval Street in Key West, Florida. There, I bought a truly terrible seascape painted with poster paints on the back of a beer carton. The painter was, I'm quite sure, homeless. That picture, too, is long gone.

Still living with me after all these years is the acrylic painting above, purchased neither because it was quite good art nor for charitable reasons. This small painting was hanging on a fence with similar works, most of them much larger (this one fit in my purse), across the street from Les Deux Magot, itself a cafe with excellent Parisian art and lit. creds.  The artist was hawking his work to tourists in the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve from the fence surrounding the ancient L'Eglise de St. Germain-des-Pres. How could anything be more European? Although, truth to tell, I imagined at the time that the painter was a broke English or American student, possibly the reason he barely managed a Bonjour or a Merci, lest we discover he was not a starving French student.

I didn't buy that painting just because it was easy to carry home. Or because it cost about 20 bucks, although in francs (it was that long ago), my usual street-art limit. Or because of the possible starving artist student. Or because I was sated after coffee and pastry at Les Deux Magot and in a spendthrift mood. Or because it was hanging on a fence surrounding an historic church.

I bought it because charcuterie is misspelled. There is no reason an artist has to be a good speller, anymore than a good speller needs to be a good artist. Still, surely the artist had seen the spelling on any number of establishments in Paris; he might even have frequented some.

The misspelling made me laugh. The fact that the faces, except or the moustachioed man, have no features but eyes also made me laugh. And it reminded me of the artist uncle of a friend who sold his work for big prices in NYC, all of them figure studies. Without faces. The man could not paint faces, my friend told me. But that didn't stop him living a charmed artists' life. If by charmed, one means selling one's work for enough to afford a middle-class life, a rarity 40 years ago, even more so now.

Possibly my favourite place in Paris, and one that's affordable--unlike the Hotel Duc de St. Simon. Since I stayed there around 1980, and it was expensive but not wildly so, it has become obscenely so--430 E. for a small suite to start. Why? The glitteratti discovered it. (Photo by Roboppy, Wikipedia,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5011222 )

The painting hangs now, as it has for many years, in my kitchen. It did not hang in my kitchen in Quillan, languedoc. It would have seemed out of place. And actually, I rather thought I'd move back to the UK at some point. I didn't like Languedoc. It isn't Paris. It isn't a place where--as I imagined--an English-speaking student would act like a French student and hang his work on a fence to try to sell it. For much of the year, Quillan is fully 40 percent English speakers. Artistic? Well, no. It has a huge art festival every spring, and the town even hides the derelict buildings on so many centre ville streets with clever painted panels. But it's still not French.

Paris is French. And no matter the language of the painter, so is that painting.