This Fall there was a lovely crisp and bright weekend where the 17th arrondissement had a wonderful event, that has become an annual rendez-vous and is imitated in several neighborhoods of Paris. It is a Portes Ouvertes (Open Door) event to visit the spaces where local artists work. You can chat with them about their work, and you can even buy some art, direct from the source from whence it came. It is authentic, it is cool, it is an experience.

We went to the studio of Barabara de la Motte Saint Pierre, who lives in the Batignolles neighborhood. She’s been there since waaaaay before it was trendy and popular amongst the baby-making thirty-somethings. She’s been there since the 70′s when no one really even knew about this corner of the city. It was a quarter where blue collar workers lived, and held onto the ‘oldness’ for a long time, you can still see it everywhere in the neighborhood, but it has often been updated to give it that fresh modern vintage look; aka : charm.

So back to Barbara’s studio. It has everything you could imagine in a quaint Parisian artist studio, a cat, dust on old clocks and keys, pots of paint brushed, wine glasses, baskets of fruit etc. The whole nine yards. So I did my best to capture the ambiance of her very charmingly cluttered space, that to me seemed so authentic and so Parisian without that commercialized frill that we now tend to attach so often to this city. Barbara is a thinker and a dreamer, the true artist type that is so well produced in Paris.

Far from the glittering and glamourous world of posh art galleries on the Faubourg Saint Honoré, Barabara is one of the most simple down-to-earth Parisians I have ever met. She is content to create and is often overly generous. We have a few of her lovely little water colors in our home. And we treasure them dearly as she is a close friend of Chéri’s, and they are beautiful pieces made with her never fading curiosity and desire to artfully depict the world as she sees it through the channel of her paint brush. Continue reading →