Montréal



My fall semester started this week, here in Bloomington, with the first meeting of my Color Design class at Ivy Tech. Afterward I had a private painting lesson with one of my students. I had been somewhat anxious about both meetings. It was my first time teaching a class since May, and I had been scrambling to update the course material in time for the first day of class, after moving, and finishing the paintings I was working on all summer. 

For the private lesson, it was my first one at the new studio/apartment, and I haven’t really finished unpacking. But I think the space was adequate.

As my student was arriving, I got a call from an unfamiliar number. The caller turned out to be a soft-spoken woman with an accent, who was calling on behalf of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. I had trouble hearing her. She was looking for people to renew their membership with the museum.

When I visited Montréal in May of last year, for two weeks, I signed up for a full yearly membership to the museum. I figured that with the amount of time I was planning to spend there it would be worth it, and it was. It is a wonderful museum. The collection is nice, with a few pieces that I found particularly engaging. And the building is exceptional, with soaring, but friendly, large spaces, one of my favorite works of museum architecture that I have encountered. I enjoyed my time there.

I told the caller from Montréal that I was about to start a lesson, and asked if she could call back.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me right now to renew a membership to a museum in another country. I don’t know when I will get back there.


Earlier this summer I was going through all the scanned drawings from my travel sketchbooks. I like and value those drawings, and wanted to prepare them for being seen more, maybe online, or as prints. When I did this, I realized that I made more drawings in Montréal than I have in any of the other places that I have visited.

The images above are from the Bougereau painting Crown of Flowers. At the top is a detail of the whole sketch below. The painting is in a room with other 19th Century art. It was often crowded there, since the room is at street level, and relatively close to the entrance.

To see it I would enter the museum on Sherbrooke Street, and check my bag, heavily laden with a tetra-pak of juice or two, snacks, waterproof shoes, and umbrella. I would take out my sketchbook, three pens, in case two of them ran out, and put on an extra shirt and jacket to deal with the air conditioning. 

As a member I got to check my bag at the members' coat check off to the left. I felt out of place there, in my worn, basic clothes. But the people who worked there were polite and friendly, even when they had to hoist my extremely heavy bag into a bin, then give me the tag to pick it up again later.


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