Working at the Cité des Arts

In many ways coming back to my little space at the Cité after a festive, people filled, week in Pouilly and St. Tropez was a nice relief. I’m enjoying it here and I very much like the lack of imposed structure.

That’s what I wrote a week ago, and I still think it holds true. Since returning from St. Tropez, I have had several sessions in the atelier gravure (the print studio) here and am getting into a good work routine making prints. I am also finding images I would like to make with the special foods in the markets and a scanner so I am scouting out ways of doing those without my usual equipment. Dealing with the language and communication differences and the fact that people just do things differently here as well as the complications that inevitably occur just finding what I need have all become part of the fun/challenge for me. I often alternate between being frustrated and over stimulated . When I can successfully solve problems, I love it. So far so good but then I have no really finished products yet that I am ready to show. I am enjoying the process.

The print studio is a wonderful, old, space with a single press, an acid room, an old- fashioned aquatint box, hot plates, burners for melting rosin and many large tables. The arrangements are such that one pays for two weeks of use at a time at the Cité. Separately one meets with all the artists who have signed up to use the studio on Fridays at noon to decide who gets to use the press when the next week. Each person can have 8 hours in two four hour blocks each week with two more hours if there are not too many people. People can use the basic studio at any of the times it is open (9-9 daily). The press, however, is reserved for the person who is signed up for that particular four-hour slot. Everyone is quite respectful of this and the press is used by only one person at a time.
None of the other artists I have met working in the atelier gravure live at the Cité. It seems that artists in Paris can pay the fee to the Cité and come to work here. I have met quite a few interesting people this way.

Everyone who works in the print studio brings his or her own supplies. These include plates, blankets for the press, colored inks, tools, paper, towels, a few blotters and acid. Staples such as black ink, space for pressing finished prints, solvent, alcohol, gasoline for the burners and some rags are provided. There are some old blankets available but I was told that they were soiled. When I tried using them with a protective paper between my printing paper and the blankets (to keep the paper clean) I found that they were also cut and so they made unwanted embossing marks in my prints.

In need of many supplies for working, I have made many excursions to art supply stores, some more successful than others. Buying new blankets was an opportunity for an adventure into a Chinese neighborhood in the periphery of Paris. I learned more about the metro, managed to walk the wrong way for about half a mile in cold wind and rain and negotiated the whole thing in French as part of the experience.

My other project, the legumes I wanted to make into images, has posed different challenges and I am still in the middle of dealing with those. Technology and services are truly different here. I found the scanning possibilities scarce but once I found a bio market and a place to take my asperges and artichauts for scanning, people there were especially helpful. Much more service is included in the much higher price for doing this than at home and I am appreciating it. There was some confusion between dpi and dpcentimeter at first and I may have done the scanning at too low a resolution. This problem is hopefully on its way to being solved. What is especially unusual is that the man at the photo studio has come here to see me rather than ask that I return again to his shop which is two metros and 45 minutes away. Very special, I think.