Christmas at the Pub with Dad, oil painting by Laura Harrison McBride

The love of pets is important to mankind, I think. This man, at a pub in Gwithian, Cornwall, a couple of years ago, clearly thinks so. When he visits the pub, he arrives at off hours so there won't be a crowd and he can let his two Jack Russells sit at the bar with him, on their own paw-print stool covers to protect the pub's upholstery. It was kind of him to let me take their picture so I could paint it, even though I will never sell it. I would sell giclee prints. Maybe I should sell them in support of a local animal rescue organization; yes, I think I will. But the original stays with me; as the former director of the Boca Raton (US) Humane Society, I understand that to many people, pets are their best friend and sometimes even their family.

Yesterday, on an international FB art page, a man with considerable technical talent posted two of his pet portraits. They were very good. But then he insulted every pet-lover on the planet by saying he didn't do them anymore because it was stupid to spend time/money on pets in preference to portraits of people, family and friends and, one must assume, "important people."

Important people. What does that even mean?

Have you ever seen a homeless person and his or her pet on the street? I have. There were three homeless men in Limoux, France, the year we lived in nearby Quillan, who were accompanied by their dogs. The shop owners allowed them the use of their entries to shelter in and, I hope, also gave them food. They were not run off, as they would be in the UK.

There was one homeless man who sat on the curb in outside our local Carrefour supermarket, seeking donations. Needless to say, he always got one from me, and the dog got a box of kibble as well. AND I saw several other shoppers do the same. 

That so-called artist who dismissed people's love of their pets and wish to memorialise them and see them in paint? He maybe a technician, but he's no artist.

Copyright 2019 by Laura Harrison McBride

Bread and jam today

What a year. I meant to finish a third children's book about Bijou, the British dog who moved to France. I meant to get the 90% complete book of poetry through the editing process and up for sale. I meant to finish the second Shelf Barker humorous mystery novel and publish it.  I've got two watercolours unfinished on the drafting table where they've been since mid-November, before we went to Ireland the second time. I meant to get rid of the intense sacroiliac pain. (Might be underway at last; fingers crossed.)

 

I cannot tick a box for any of the above except--I hope and pray--the last. 

 

I did go to Ireland twice and meet more than half a dozen of my second cousins for the first time. Went to Leo's Tavern in Donegal for the first time, home of Enya, Clannad and Moya Brennan because Leo is their father. We replaced the ratty carpet in our entry and living room with hardwood. I renewed a connection with a friend. I had a really not very exciting art exhibit. (I will NEVER ever invite people into my studio again; I mean, do actors invite theatregoers to visit them in their dressing rooms? Argh. What was I thinking?)

 

However, I planned to post some words and art from upcoming books/sales as holiday gifts, and so I shall. But they are not new, mainly; they have a bit of age on them. But they come with love...as long as you don't insist on seeing the mess in my studio/office!

 

 

Bread and jam today

by Laura Harrison McBride

Winter is late. Freezing. Cold draughts limbo under the front door,

roll up the stairs and hopscotch around the banisters to

attack me in my studio. No, no

I will not buy fingerless gloves. I will turn 

on a space heater. I will

because I am not Degas, this is not Paris, and

I have a meal ticket. A man who

supports my engaging the arts to do battle with

whatever demons make us--

all of us arty folk--

engage ourselves in repetitive futility.

NYC tenement in earlier times; reminds me of Degas' Paris studio.

The best do not repeat. The wealthy

do. The wealthy artists find

a gimmick, a gimcrack, and crack their

muse on its sharp, metallic edges

all the way to the bank. Schnabel pottery on canvas--

oh dear, and other

New York talentless...well, I had better not go there. But,

No frozen, northern-lighted studio for them; they can afford 

heat. Models.

Holiday trips to exotic lands. I can

turn on the heat, thanks to my meal

ticket (dear man, he's my soul's bread and butter.)

I can labour at one-offs until I tire, and then

go downstairs, toss costly grounds

into the French press, stick a piece

of my favourite once for-rich-folks-only

white bread into the toaster. Slather butter, spread

strawberry Bon Maman to my heart's content.

Brown bread I used to bake, before the meal ticket, and drench

in butter and honey still warm. In the old days, the days when

I couldn't turn up the heat. I had no meal ticket. But I wouldn't...no,

never...I wouldn't use a gimmick to attract buyers. I ate brown bread, honey, not much else. But no gimmicks.

No.

Thank god for my beautiful tall handsome meal ticket; I owe him my art.

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride

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.