If you could live like a French Impressionist, would you give up your current life to make art?

[MrScorpio]

4 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Sign me up and make sure to provide me with all the Gauloises I can smoke
	0 (0%)
	Only if it comes with the modern French social safety net, I gotta eat
	0 (0%)
	Fresh air, cheap wine, itchy wool clothes, the lingering aroma of oil paints… What's not to love?
	3 (75%)
	Art is such a scam… I want in on it
	0 (0%)
	No, I'd rather be an abstract expressionist… It's better to fake talent that way
	0 (0%)
	Are social diseases involved?
	0 (0%)
	La vie est merde!
	0 (0%)
	No, thanks. I'd rather be famous while I'm still alive
	1 (25%)
	A fool and his Monet are soon parted
	0 (0%)
	Le Robb est un dingbat
	0 (0%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
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[Aristus]

1. Sure! Paint by day. Live it up with excellent wine and food and Parisian hotties by night.

Call yourself an artist, and women will be lining up to take their clothes off for you...

[TuxedoKat]

2. Well...

if I could live/work in the south of France, visit Paris and paint in the South Pacific too, like Gaugin, sign me up!

[Auggie]

3. Tahiti … my first thought too

Sign me up

[TuxedoKat]

4. Yes indeed!

Here is American Impressionist who traveled in the South Seas too.

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa92.htm

http://www.dropbears.com/a/art/biography/Louis_Eilshemius.html

[Auggie]

7. Thanks

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Ah, the strange fillips of Fortune ...

for every great artist, there are dozens of near-greats whose fate has been to be largely forgotten.

In a better world, there would be a project to make EVERY non-copyrighted painting accessible from a common portal -- with a good search engine and an index of themes, techniques. etc.

(Remember those old predictions that TV would lead to universal education, and we'd all sit around watching nature documentaries and other such enlightening fare ? Well, if anyone hoped for the same from the Internet, Facebook, the "look at me !" institution, is the reality.)

[TuxedoKat]

12. Yes, the strange fillips of fortune indeed

Sadly mostly unappreciated during his lifetime. I saw a show of his works at the Hirschhorn or the National Gallery of Art years ago. Ah, the irony.

Here is another obscure artist (poet) you might appreciate. He did get some appreciation during his lifetime but his admirers were actually making fun of him, although he didn't realize it. I guess he had the last laugh though, as he is probably remembered and celebrated more for his contributions than most of his detractors. One of his poems I remember quite fondly when I first read it for making me laugh. It was a romantic poem but he stuck something in there so incongruous, at least to a modern reader that it didn't work! It might have been okay to people of his era though. Interesting to contemplate things like that. Hmm, skimming through his poems some of them aren't that bad. Probably no worse than many other amateur poets of that era.

http://columbiametro.com/Columbia-Metro/Things-To-Do/index.php/name/Blythewood-to-Celebrate-Historical-Hometown-Poet-J-Gordon-Coogler/event/8474/

Hmm, I just remembered someone wrote a book about Eilshemius. I think I'll go buy a used copy to put next to my Coogler volumes!

[Yavin4]

5. Don't tease me, bro. n/t

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

6. I would love it

I already devote much time to the art of the jazz guitar, which I've been working at for decades now (I'm 64). Dedication of one's life to beauty and civilization is not a wasted life in my opinion, even if it brings absolutely no financial rewards. I love the period of the 1870s - 1880s, part of the Victorian period. My favorite authors are from that era including French and English authors (I'm bilingual and French was my first language since my mother is French). I love the idea of living in a world where there was only one-fourth of the world population that we now have. I'd love to live in an era of horse drawn carriages like the hansom cabs of the London of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (I'm a major Sherlock Holmes nut and Anglophile). I'd love to live in an era where true absinthe was not outlawed, nor was cocaine or opium (I don't do drugs but I like the idea of being able to experience them if it is my choice). I'd love to live in a world where the architecture is harmonious with human surroundings such as that which you still find in certain parts of Europe and where cities weren't dominated by absolutely grotesque (in my opinion) hermetically sealed square and rectangular high rises made of steel and glass with windows that don't open up to the city street. I'd love to live as far away as possible from a suburbia where everyone has to grow a lawn in front of their house, where cities forbid you to build a high wall around your house so that neighbors can see everything you do, and where everything is flat for miles and strip malls and mini-malls are central to your activities. Except for my love of and devotion to music, I do not enjoy my current life and would love to live like a French impressionist painter and live in that world of the 1880s.

[elleng]

8. A fool and her Monet are soon parted!!!

[eppur_se_muova]

10. I already have the beret and the beard, just need to work out the other details. nt

[LiberalEsto]

11. I prefer to keep both ears, thank you! nt