An aside to Paris - Day 6 - re : art at Georges Pompidou

I almost forgot to mention that the very first work that we saw when we walked into the exhibit hall at Centre Georges Pompidou was one by Willem de Kooning - I got so excited when I saw it, much to Shawn's confusion! A few months ago, the company I work for produced a hard cover art catalogue for this artist's works on exhibit at Allan Stone Gallery in NYC. I found his paintings of women & human figures featured in the catalogue to be...well, not my cup of tea, I guess....but, we got to work with a woman who specializes in color accuracy in dealing with art photography, who was so interesting to meet and interact with. After having a really long conversation with her one day, I actually had wanted to blog about it, but never got around to it. She had explained to me all of the factors that need to be taken into consideration when not only photographing art and ensuring accurate color reproduction of the works, but how exhibits should be set up of galleries in general - covering everything from the lighting to the color of the walls & floors. Although I knew nothing about these subjects, and artists tend to have the reputation of being 'flakey', her explanations to me where in layman's terms that were fairly easy to understand - I actually impressed myself with being able to follow along in the conversation. I found out that she paints herself, and that de Kooning was her mentor for many years. Imagine being specialized in something so detailed as this, it was just so fascinating! Up until that point, working in the print industry had been pretty dry and monotonous, despite all of the learning on paper, ink and processes I had done, but working with this artist added an exciting dimension to my daily job for a few days, and I was grateful for the opportunity.

Here's a pic of de Kooning's painting that we saw at Pompidou - actually not so bad, as I have always been a fan of abstracts (it has no title & was painted in 1976) :