After my crisis where I thought I’d try not painting for awhile, I realized that that’s stupid. I just can’t not paint. I’m still in a crisis as I try to figure out how the hell to sell all that art, but I can’t stop making it. Today, I sat down and did a little painting of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery that I visited on my trip to France last month. At the end of our river cruise, my mom and I tacked on a couple days in Paris because our cruise didn’t include a couple of my favorite spots on their tour. One of those spots was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery where all sorts of famous-y-type people are buried. It’s fun hunting down the various graves, but honestly, even if you don’t look for any one marker in particular, it’s a gorgeous, peaceful stroll. There are huge, monument style markers, mausoleums, and small, more modest headstones. Some date back to the 1800’s, and some are more recent, and they are the final resting places for everyone from Moliere, Chopin, Delacroix, and Oscar Wilde, to Jim Morrison.

A couple tips for anyone interested in visiting: if you take the metro, get off at the Gambetta station, not the Pere Lachaise station. That will allow you to enter the cemetery from the opposite end, which means you’ll be walking downhill most of the way through the cemetery. If you’re visiting in the summer, wear bug spray, because the gnats and mosquitos can be intense. Fair warning: if you don’t have a map and wander around long enough, drunk guys will offer to show you to various graves and expect payment when they get you there. Their English is generally good enough to get basics across to you, and, honestly, we had fun chatting with our “guide” as he weaved us through the cemetery, but there is some haggling at the end for how much you pay them. Start low, because they’ll ask for more.

Anyway, here is the painting I just knocked out – one of the shady paths through the cemetery: