Peony obsession

I can't get enough of peonies right about now. Every time I walk by a peony, this song gets stuck in my head. One of my friends has peonies growing in her yard every year, and I'm so jealous. All the peonies, please!

Postcards from Paris: The Museum Life

So here we are. Ah, Paris. About a month ago, I got to go to Paris (actually, France!) for the very first time ever. For some reason, the City of Light just had never been on my must-go European radar. I think a bit of the aversion stemmed from the inferiority complex I have of being one of the only linguists I know who does not speak any French. But here's the thing. I know plenty of French. You know, the important stuff like pâtisserie, or boulangerie, or baguette, macaron, croissant, tarte, chocolat, madeleine, thé, fromage ... At least I didn't starve to death because of my terrible French, I'll tell you that!

Oh, but food. Food is for another post. There is just too much to chronicle, to share, about my trip that I've decided to break it up into shorter "postcards" for you all. I hope you don't mind the episodic nature, but it will give all of us more to look forward to, right? Plus, Paris. One should not rush Paris. One should stroll slowly, and study everything.

So this post. This post is about something that set my heart a-flutter in Paris: THE ART. I didn't have much time, so I spent one day at the Louvre, and another day at the Musée d'Orsay. How I would have loved to visit all the museums, but no, stroll slowly. Study everything.

There were moments in these museums when I would see a piece and be like, no no no, I can't possibly be standing in front of a Manet tabletop, or a Cezanne, or one of Monet's ladies, or a Degas figure sculpture, or a Rembrandt portrait, or a de Heem floral still life, or Van Gogh's vigorous brushstrokes. I nearly cried at the first Cezanne.

And really, it wasn't about the names. Those could matter less to me. (I think I made the "not impressed face" at the Mona Lisa. But that could have also been due to the bajillion tourists crowded around the painting.) What I was most fascinated by was the interpretation of the visual world, which made the art so devastatingly beautiful to witness. You can see the individuality of how each artist's eye sees the world, and how light and dark and color gets uniquely translated from the eye through the mind and body, to the canvas. But in these incredibly longitudinal collections housed in Paris, you can at the same time see how much the ebb and flow of communal ideas from the time, culture, and community that each artist lived in also influenced the way they made sense of imagery.

My absolutely favorite part of these museums was standing as close as I could without getting yelled at by the docents, to see each brushstroke on canvas. It's this texture that you just don't get with prints, and basically can't get unless you're standing in front of the original thing. It was amazing (argh, using that word so much here) to see the diversity of each stroke, how much or how little paint made it on, how each different type of stroke had its role in telling the overall story.

I thought a lot about my art--dessert, photography--while studying these masters. As an artist, what one does is transfer some sort of vision into a different medium. For these guys in the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay, it's the visual world to paint. In photography, it's the visual world to pixels or printed page. (In dessert, the world translates into sugar and dairy and flavor.) But, that old adage is true: something always gets lost in translation. The translation is imperfect. Because we can never give the viewer a complete, 100% replica of the world, what we're translating. The message is always mediated, e.g. by unconscious factors that we can't control (i.e., the way our brain processes light). But what makes these masters masters -- I think -- or, what makes artistry in art -- is the way this imperfect translation, the loss, becomes something more. Something beautifully represented and full of vivacious complexity in its own right.

That's what I want to (quite humbly) strive for, too.

In Paris, stroll slowly. Study everything. And one might yet receive a private art lesson from Cezanne.

--

More Paris soon, stay tuned!

(Also, post hoc apologies to any actual art peeps out there for my very amateur ramblings.)

Postcards: May in Yosemite

I know I promised photos from Paris... and they're coming. But this week, a colleague was visiting from out of town, who had never been to Yosemite before. So I took the opportunity to show off this magestic national park that I now get to call my "neighborhood." It's been really fun living so close to this amazing place this past year. While I haven't managed to take as much advantage of my annual national parks pass as I'd like, having more access than ever before has let me witness of the changing of the seasons in this place, and I love seeing the panoramas and scenes borne anew with the vicissitudes of light and weather. It always seems as though fresh surprises are in store for me each time I get to visit--the living artistry of it all is inspiring.

May in Yosemite brings...

Shimmering pools tucked into random forest patches

Wildflowers galore, on trees and ground alike

Blue jays skittering from branch to branch overhead

Millipede sightings (cool or ew?)

Squirrels with so much bravado around humans (no feeding the wildlife!)

Quiet nooks under trees, on boulders, for light napping or deep thinking

Fleeting veils of misty waterfalls that glow when graced by the sunshine

Make sure to follow along on instagram to get up-to-date adventures!

Previous Yosemite visits:

Winter in Yosemite Valley

Summer in Yosemite Valley

Quick update, and a poll!

So, if you have ever wanted evidence of how incredibly strange and awkward of a person I am to interact with in real life, Gabriel Soh of The Dinner Special managed to catch me on video in a podcast interview! That should provide you with some laughs of schadenfreude as you appreciate me getting stumped with questions like, "what blogs do you follow now?" or "Who would you invite to dinner, if you could invite anyone in the world to dinner?"

(You'd think that these questions would be easy, but the head scratchers I'm used to thinking about regularly these days are usually of the type, "What's the best statistical analysis for this data?"!)

(Photo below from Gabriel Soh's podcast.)

In other news, I need your opinion! As summer rolls around, I've been thinking seriously about the future of this blog. I feel so appreciative to have this special space carved out on the internet on which to share snippets of food and photography with you all, but it's time for a bit of an evolution. So here's my question for you, for the next chapter of this blog:

How often would you prefer to see new posts on Desserts for Breakfast?

Finally, it's peony season!

(and P.S. I'll be back soon with a monster post about recent travels in Paris. Stay tuned.)