My Artist Residency in France

I love to travel more than anything. I have given up any semblance of domestic life in order to give this more time. But to do this means getting creative for how to make it affordable.

So I discovered artist residencies. And I have begun to use body painting and costume art as a way to travel and to share my art globally. Only I don’t want to just create the art. I want it to make a statement and hopefully an impact.

So when I started applying for residencies I decided to let the message of my art be water conservation. I have been a water protector for most of my life and after going to Standing Rock to support the movement of “Water for Life”, I took this title for myself as well. I even built an earth ship with sustainable living and water conservation in mind.

It’s not easy to find any artist residency that will accept a body artist since my art is only temporary and not something that can be on display in a gallery for more than one evening. Besides that, body painting is still considered pretty risqué in many countries. The best body painting can only be done directly on the skin without fabric interfering. So of course, since nudity is involved it is a bit taboo.

Last year I was accepted into a France artist Residency at a lovely location in Cassis. The house was beautiful, in an upper-class neighborhood, with a castle on a nearby hill overlooking it. It was just two blocks from the beach and the quaint little town of Cassis which has numerous bakeries and traditional French restaurants. There is an open-air market twice a week with vendors selling gourmet cheeses, fresh organic vegetables, French antiques, and current fashions.

 

Sophie, the hostess of the residency, while very busy with her own business was also very attentive to the artists, making sure we were comfortable and always had what we needed. She was generous enough to introduce me to the town's biggest art patrons to discuss options for where to display my one night show. They were very interested in my work and Sophie interpreted each of our questions for each other in French. Unfortunately, it did not prove fruitful as it was decided that this town was just too modest to really be open to what I had to offer.

So I began my own search through social media and finally came upon a small gallery in Marseilles that was happy to host my show. I visited the gallery and felt good about the partnership, excited to be showing in the alternative arts section of town. I had two weeks left to create the costume and design the body art dedicated to water conservation.

In the meantime, I did a lot of exploring France, collecting materials along the way for my project. I had invited my dear friend and aunt by marriage to apply to the residency at the same time as me and she was accepted too! So, Christy and I rented a car and drove to all of her favorite small towns within a few hours of the residency. We went to the one place that I definitely wanted to go to -TWICE! In the Camargue, a large national park, I could see and photograph the pink flamingos during their mating season. 

 

  

Lucky for me she knew the country pretty well and was especially familiar with the food, having attended a cordon bleu cooking school herself. So I got to taste a lot of wonderful French cuisine and learn about the many kinds of cheeses and fine wines along the way. Being a lover of sweets, I was excited to learn that each town even has its own signature dessert. And every town serves warm chocolate cake- my favorite!

 
 

We saw a lot of really wonderful art. And the circus was literally in town! So we got to see a show at the International Circus Festival in Marseilles! 

And of course, I found a parade!

I was down to the wire when I finally found a model for the show, another artist at the residency. We would be in Marseilles for one night to do the show and then I would leave the next day to head back to the states.

 

The work in progress

My costume and body art turned out beautifully. The message was that as humans we have the choice to keep our water clean and pristine or to pollute it with our waste. Her upper half was body painted in shades of blue designs representing flowing water. She wore a large collar and a headdress in three shades of blue with shapes like ocean waves and adorned in chandelier crystals representing drops of water. Her bottom half was garbage bags wrapped around her waist and extending onto the floor all around her to represent trash that is going into the sea.

When the doors of the gallery opened to the public that night I had high hopes, as always, to create a presence that would not be easily forgotten in France. The gallery owner was an elderly French man who had been very kind and was assisted by a few young black African refugee men who did everything to help make things just to my satisfaction for the show. A DJ was also there and photographs of the most recent Marseilles protests, protecting special trees, were the backdrop. Everyone with the gallery was very kind and the other art seemed like a great combination for my piece. I felt I was in good hands there.

But the evening did not quite go the way that I had hoped.  Very few people came into the gallery and the ones who did were only male African refugees looking to party. I believe that because so many of them also sat right outside the door smoking marijuana and looking a bit daunting, others were not too keen to enter. One of them even came up to me at the start and blatantly suggested, “You will go home with me tonight.”

As the hours droned on, there were more nasty propositions and more men came into the gallery. In fact, I noted that I had seen very few women out at night anyway. The owner and his assistants seemed nervous around the other men and even though they sensed our discomfort, they were obviously not willing to speak up and ask them to leave. It was clear that they knew that would cause more trouble than they wanted.

The scene became more of a party and finally, when one man ran up and tried to put his mouth on my models’ breast, I had had enough. The people who ran the gallery did little other than gently reprimand the man while I ran out and started screaming for him to get the fuck away from her. At this point, I decided it was time to go. She was dressed and we were packed up and left within ten minutes. I thanked the owner and we left, careful to watch our backs not to be followed to our Uber around the corner.

Never in my twenty plus years as a body artist had I seen a public assault on a model and I was severely upset and embarrassed for the art form I loved. I was just glad we got out of there with no harm. And I was particularly grateful that my aunt had gone home the day before and had not had to experience that trauma with us.

It was clearly a lesson to vet all event spaces during the day and the night in future circumstances. Places can be 100% different in the dark than they are in the light. And since it’s my responsibility to ensure the safety of my models, it was a tough lesson to learn. We went home and talked about it for hours, letting go of our trauma as best we could, both realizing we had been lucky that nothing worse had happened. 

My time in France was really a treat until that incident. Sadly, it was the last thing I experienced in that elegant country before leaving. But I will not let it tarnish the memories of the rest of my time there. I experienced a beautiful culture, had splendid food and saw marvelous art of all kinds. And I got some of my favorite photographs of wildlife yet- of the pink flamingos!!

Se la vie!