As I’ve been spending time travelling recently, my painting and miniature work has fallen way behind and as a result, my Blog postings have been very infrequent.  Paris is a great city to sit, drink eat and watch and apart from reading a couple of books and working through some sketches, that’s pretty much all I did for the last couple of weeks.  With the early arrival of some unseasonally fine warm weather, it was most enjoyable.  In recent years I enjoy much more the process of looking and watching rather than taking photographs of everything.   I can become a bit of a slave to a camera – photographing everything and commiting it to film deprives me of properly “seeing and observing” rather than just looking while I point the camers, so it’s nice to not feel the pressure of having to take photo’s all the time.    However, at times I’ll just give in to the urge and use my mobile phone  to take little snaps.   We stayed around our favourite part of paris which is the Opera area.  The lines of the wonderful Opera building itself  were lounfortunately obscured by scaffolding while they work on it, however, that didn’t prevent us sitting in the little bar opposite for a beer while rush hour paris swept by.  Further south of Paris, the palace of Varsailles was also getting a make-over and once again it didn’t prevent us from enjoying a wonderful day there.  The gilding on the palace facade still shone through to echo the similar finish on the place railings, almost in defiance of the workmens scaffolding!

Here are a few from the very few that I took: