The modern traveler’s social life:
Z is a Turkish American living in Istanbul. She’s my dad’s boss’s daughter. We were introduced via email, met up in Istanbul, and friended each other on Facebook. After we arrived in Paris, she wrote on my FB wall, with a link to Jim Haynes‘s dinner parties. After emailing Jim, we received an invitation to dinner.
–> At Jim’s I met Edith, who lives in Paris. She took my card, then emailed me an invite to her Meetup at the Musée d’Art Moderne.
–> At Edith’s Meetup I met Dov, who also lives in Paris. He took my card and emailed me about a secret concert at the Palais de Tokyo (incidentally next door to the Musée d’Art Moderne), which he had found out about via FB, from musician/composer Rhys Chatham (an American living in Paris).
And that’s how I ended up at the Palais de Tokyo last night, bopping on a squishy black leather ottoman and sketching Rhys Chatham‘s secret show.
{mouse over images to read notes – click to enlarge via flickr}
It was a fantastic setting and great music for live sketching: tons of energy and a very cool vibe. Imagine eleven electric guitarists and a drummer going all-out, and you might get a sense of the roar in the air. It reminded me of taiko concerts, where the vibrations go right into you, and you respond not with your ears and whatever else you usually use to judge music, but with your body and your instincts.
Here’s a video from one of Chatham’s shows in Geneva in 2009.
I started out doing my usual thing of trying to draw individual figures, but after a time that wasn’t as interesting, so I started experimenting: drawing the whole group, trying to find other ways to depict people and try to get the feel of the music into my marks.
It was a great evening, very serendipitous, very alive.
I love your sketches and your step-by-step breakdown of how you got to the show! Just goes to show that when you travel, you never know who you’ll meet and where those meetings will take you!
Thanks so much! So true about meeting people while traveling — and it’s interesting, because even though we’ve been on the road for more than 6 months now, Paris is the place where we’ve met the most new people.
Yeah! right on!
Glad I introduced you, glad you took the challenge!
Will publish my sketches soon, promise!
Can’t wait to see them!
And thank you for getting me to draw today at the Petit Palais too. I’ll post those sketches next week. 
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Well, that’s different. Call me a ‘stick in the mud’ but melodies do it for me.
Isn’t it fun to draw to music? Live music? I like that Idea of the 2 stykes drawing the scene or background first. I can feel the music in the figures and it is interesting for me to see someone else’s drawings of musicians, I can look at mine in a different way and learn from yours. The last one looks like some of mine – interesting.I like the shadow one andthe dark shaped figures – different from what I do. Did ou use one of those brush pens?
Yes it is! Music adds such a different spirit to the process, and of course different kinds of music give their own flavor. I did use brush pens — the darkish grey one is one of those Faber-Castell Pitt artist markers, and the brushy black one is a Zig Clean Color.
It’s also nice that you add where you were. I forget to do that or well really think ‘ll ruin my drawing if I write on it because it will be a different style. Do you use pencil or pen to ID your drawings? or both.
I have a nice robust fine-point pen I got in Glasgow that I’ve been using to ID my drawings (and write with, too; it’s definitely become one of my favorites). Sometimes I really want the softness of pencil while I’m out sketching but I always go back to pens and markers just because they’re so much less messy to use/store/carry.
Yes and you don’t want to carry a can of fixative around with you on your travels
Definitely not.