Sketching At Paillard In Quebec City

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Larry Marshall

The first restaurant I sketched was the new Paillard in one of the Quebec City Malls. You can read about it in a post about the brown-paper sketchbook, if you like. This one has few walls and I sketched it while standing outside the restaurant.

But there’s another Paillard that is more famous, if restaurant fame is measured by being part of tourist’s agenda items when they visit Quebec City. This one, the original Paillard, is in downtown Quebec City, the “old” city, on rue St. Jean. This is not a really old cafe where poetry was read and music played in the 60s like Chez Temporel. In fact, when I came to Quebec City long ago to do a post-doctoral fellowship, the location of Paillard was a grocery store ‘down the street’ from my apartment and I shopped there regularly.

But in the intervening years I moved away and Paillard took the place of the grocery store. It has become a ‘hot spot’ for tourists. It’s a large, brightly-lit and roomy melange of a bakery and a café. Their pastries are wonderful but the real star is their frothy coffee drinks, including one of my favorites, the bol de café au lait. I’m mostly ignorant of differences between latte, cappuccino, and the other frothy drinks are but in the case of café au lait I think it’s heaven. While I normally drink my coffee black, I’ll break with tradition for a bol de café au lait. It’s strong coffee with lots of frothy milk added to it and I add a bit of brown sugar to the mix. But it’s the bol part of the equation that’s important…it comes in a soup bowl so you get a lot of it.

I’m rambling. Sorry. Claudette and I went to sketch Paillard the other day and we had a great time. I got my bol de café au lait and a muffin. She was less of a cochon (pig) and got a regular café au lait. We were there early and pretty much had the place to ourselves. There were a couple people sitting behind me and Claudette started sketching them. With no people in my sight line I drew food and chairs and tables. Ultimately I did quickly sketch a woman who was ordering something, maybe her own bol de café au lait . Here is my tribute to Paillard.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4x6), TWSBI MIni, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI MIni, Platinum Carbon Black

A Little Bit Of Paris

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Larry Marshall

If you’ve been following this blog you know that I’m spending some of my winter sketching time at our museum and its Paris 1900 exhibit. This week I decided, without giving it sufficient thought, that I should sketch a huge black and white photo that’s projected on a wall. It must be 12-14 feet tall and shows an indoor shopping area that, I understand, still exists today.

So I opened my Stillman & Birn 6×9 Zeta sketchbook, grabbed my TWSBI Mini, and started drawing. Somewhere in the early stages I realized that I’d either chosen too large a subject, a sketchbook that was too small, or the TWSBI nib wasn’t fine enough. Maybe the problem was a combination of all three of these things with a dash of my penchant for drawing everything. Leaving stuff out is hard for me. Whatever the reasons, the result was like the proverbial 10-pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound bag.

But I persevered because the process itself was fun – it’s always fun. Lots of stuff to organize, proportion, and to draw. I’m not sure what the woman in the middle was doing or carrying but you can see that several men were looking at her. While the photo was a bit vague in its over-sized presentation, there was a large ‘something’ flowing out from her hands. Maybe it was a shawl, a scarf or maybe a smoke bomb (grin). It was impossible to say. But I thought a bit of color would help center their gaze, and maybe yours.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6x9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

Tis The Season To Be Jolly?

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Bah! Humbug! – Ebeneezer Scrooge

When I was a kid the best part about Christmas was that my train got set up under the Christmas tree. Well, that was the second best thing. The best thing was that, back then, the icicles we put on the tree were made from aluminum, not plastic like they are now and, if you laid one across the rails of my train tracks, you could make sparks. Yeah…THAT was the best part about Christmas.

But these days? Am I really suppose to be ‘jolly’? Are you kidding me? Modern Christmas seems to be one painful experience after another – like shopping.

I was Christmas shopping the other day. I hate crowds so you can imagine the thrill this was for me. Aside from not being able to find what I was looking for, a woman ran into me and almost knocked me down. She said she didn’t see me (I am only 6-feet tall after all). I spent half an hour wandering around without finding anything on my ‘to buy’ list. No, that’s not correct. I found scotch tape.

Being frustrated I sat down in the mall. Sitting felt good and very soon I had my notebook in hand and I sketched a lamp post and associated thingies (technical term meaning “I don’t know what they are”).

I was trying my new Pilot Penmanship which is the finest-writing fountain pen I’ve ever experienced. It was not pleased by the el cheapo paper in my dollar store notebook (3×5) and kept picking up paper fibers. Nevertheless, it was good therapy and I even smiled when the guy who was watching me told me it was a good sketch.

So…I went back into the fray. I decided try the new French store, Target. We’re just starting to get them here. Wander…wander…wander. Ah…score…I found the battery we need for the door chime and one of the items on the gift list. Only a little… some… a lot more to do. Sigh… guys are not designed for this shopping stuff. We have insufficient stamina. Frustration is back. Time for tea.

At the food court, sipping tea I got from Tim Horton’s. They’re better at coffee. Notebook is out again and I quick-sketched people who, like me, are sitting around, wishing they were somewhere else. You can see the frustration on their faces… nobody is jolly. Or maybe I was jnust projecting. Oh how I long for the days of aluminum icicles on railroad tracks.

Sketching At Chez Temporel

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I first came to Quebec City to do a post-doctoral fellowship. That was to last two years and it did, and I left as I took a research position in Ontario. More significant, though, was that during that period I met my wife.

I knew nothing of Quebec and even less French than I know now. You can’t do much with a vocabulary that consists of bonjour, champagne and pamplemousse. Why I knew the word for grapefruit is still a mystery to me. If you’ve ever been in a city where you don’t speak the language, you know that sticking to tourist areas and shopping where prices are clearly marked is a survival skill. I ate at McDonalds a lot because I could order by number. And so life was for me. Many parts of the city were off limits to me.

When I started dating my wife, she took me places I’d never been. One of those places was Chez Temporel, a small cafe off the main streets. Its facade would not be out of place in Paris and, at the time, the inside could easily have been a place where writers and artists went to talk and philosophize. In fact, according to history, Chez Temporel hosted poetry readings and folk music on its second floor.

I discovered bol du cafe au lait (bowl of coffee with milk). I’d never heard of drinking coffee from a bowl and, typically, I put nothing in my coffee. But I LIKED this stuff, particularly the large volume of it that came in the bowl. My remembrance of that first bol might be sweetened by the memories of a budding love affair but that’s another story, for another time.

Today I’m reporting on a more recent trip to Chez Temporel, this time with sketching buddy Claudette. We arrived at 9:30 which, on a Monday, is a great time to go there to sketch there if you want to sketch the restaurant itself. Not so much if you want to sketch people as this is their lull period. We had a great time. Claudette did sketch the few people who were eating. I sketched this:

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

On The Dark Side

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I was at the Musée de la Civilisation with Yvan on Sunday. We were sketching. We had decided, at the last minute, to meet there and we had a great time. I suppose it’s somewhat redundant to say we were sketching and we having a good time as one thing means the other to me. Nevertheless, we were sketching and having fun.

I decided to do something very different, at least for me, but first a bit of back story. Albert Laliberté was a Québec sculptor who, like many Quebec artists at the time, headed to France to lead the Bohemian life and bask in the glow of the great French masters, and consume large quantities of wine. While he was there, Albert attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he developed his skills. One of the things I love about his work is that he sculpting people working with their hands, so he has created bronzes of blacksmiths, cobblers, and even painters.

What has this to do with Sunday sketching at the Musée de la Civilisation? Well, as it happens, the Paris on Stage exhibit has a room devoted to Québec artists who went to Paris and then returned to have significant art careers, like good old Albert Laliberté and several of his bronzes are on display in that room.

From the “I’d like to draw that” point of view, however, the museum’s multiple light sources and always from above, make it difficult to sketch the details of the pieces as they are often in very dark shadow. I thought this might be an opportunity to try something different, for me, and so I launched myself into high contrast mode, concentrating on the shadows as the major source for shape and relegating outline to a more minor role than most of my sketches.

As a first attempt, I was fairly satisfied with the result. I still have much to learn about drawing and I’m REALLY a rookie when it comes to this approach. But, here is Laliberté’s Paysagist (landscape artist). Apologies to Monsieur Laliberté.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6x9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black, Tombow brush pens

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black, Tombow brush pens