When I’ve imagined a character somewhere, and then actually visit that location, the sensation is a bit surreal and heady. I’m both in the moment and in my imagined world.
Sennelier is an artist’s supply shop in Paris, where my main character, Dez, bought her supplies in the late 1920s. I love that it still exists. I took this photograph last November, on an unseasonably warm and beautiful day.
In Paris, she’d loved Sennelier, its cramped aisles, loved opening tubes of paint and inhaling them, fingers itching to squeeze them. Paris was a memory even more remote than Boston. Not quite real anymore, that year and a half of classes, the school’s high-domed studio, sharing the tiny rue de Fleurus flat with the wry and wonderful Jane Park from Bristol.
Jacob would be like this, and soon: gone, turned to a memory, not quite real.
—From Cascade
