Rick Janson Art Studio

I get tired just thinking about it. It’s about storms, both metaphorical and real. Instead of making art, I find myself spending hours clearing snow from around the house, and in between, prevent ice build-up during the times when the temperatures hover around zero. I also keep on wrestling with the idea of changing my narratives given the chaos of the world, but then again think that perhaps it might be time to escape all that and establish my own narratives?

And in the midst of it all we just came through the holiday season. Maintaining traditions means for us bringing down bins of material from the attic to decorate the house — a process that takes about five days. We return the emptied bins to the attic only to bring them down again after New Year to carefully pack everything up again. Thankfully that’s a much shorter period — two days. A recent tradition has involved a lighted Christmas village we have built up over many years. Each year I place a Batman figurine in there, and the grandkids try and find him — kind of a Where’s Waldo moment. This year Batman was buying a taco at the food truck, helping out at the tree lot, warming himself beside Santa at a campfire, and surveying the city atop the cathedral.

Amid all the craziness in the world, I was stunned to read that the Pompidou Centre in Paris was closing its doors for the next five years. Opened in 1977, it is undergoing a second round of renovations, the first done in the late 1990s.

For those not familiar with the Centre, it houses the world’s second largest museum of modern art, a large reference library, a cinema and a music and acoustics research centre. It draws about five million visitors a year to its Paris location in the Marais, although the Pompidou also has a series of satellite locations across the world, including in Brazil, China, Spain and Belgium. None yet for Canada, sadly.

The Pompidou has a collection of nearly 120,000 items, some of which will go into storage, others distributed to these satellites during the five-year renovation process. As a December 21 New York Times article noted, it took the Louvre three days to pack up and move 4,000 “national treasures” to safety prior to World War II. It’s anticipated that one single exhibit at the Pompidou will take closer to five weeks to pack up — Le magasin de Ben — which was an actual record and camera shop in Nice prior to being moved to the Pompidou Centre in 1974.

When I visited the Pompidou in 2022, I was captivated by it. Ben Vautier had made his shop a hang out for the art community in Nice, constantly adding found objects to the display and encouraging the participation of those who frequented the shop. The shop itself became a piece of art. When it came to the Pompidou, it was accompanied by a 300-page manual on how to reassemble it on site. The conservators are now using that manual to disassemble it as well as undertake restoration on artifacts within the shop — no doubt some were never intended to last this long. That includes photographing every little bit of it.

Curiously, while our travelling companions in 2022 were eager to get to the Musee D’Orsay, I spend the day alone at the Pompidou, which meant I could view the gallery at my own pace and felt little responsibility to the others in our party as a result. While I lament the lack of popular interest in modern art, the Pompidou still receives nearly five million visitors a year.

The collection is an incredible survey of the development of art in the 20th century and is very international in scope. You’ll get to see a Dubuffet in one room, a Pollock in another.

I get tired thinking about what a task it would be to pack up so many art items, not to mention an entire library of books on the lower level, some of which will go to an alternate location in Paris. And when the renovation is done — the Pompidou plans to reopen in 2030 — all this has to be put back again.

The Pompidou was the center of controversy when it first opened. The design competition was awarded to two young architects — Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano — who seemed equally shocked that their radical “inside-out” design had won the competition. All the technical functions of the building that are normally hidden were featured on the outside, colour-coded to their function. Like the Eiffel Tower, it was initially derided by the press, but Parisians came to love the building over time.

While under renovation the building will celebrate its 50th year in 2027.

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It has been a busy time for me — I have been working hard at completing some work to enter into another juried show in Toronto next month. Deadline is this weekend. I’ve also been gathering quotes for an art book I hope to have ready by the time of the Scugog Studio Tour in May. The book would be an introduction to my work and highlight some of the newer pieces to come out of my “art hut.” I started writing it more than a year ago — the difficulty is choosing when to put a cap on the work I would like to see in it. You always think the next piece is going to be the truly great one — the “just one more” syndrome. I currently have a piece on show in the Rare Form group show at the Station Gallery in Whitby. I also started to work on some smaller pieces that I hope would be more affordable for the Studio Tour in May. Hopefully in the next day or two I will have a new piece (or possibly) two up on this site. I tend to work on multiple pieces at a time, so it can sometimes be a long time between new works, then they seem to arrive in a flurry. Of the four pieces I have on the go, the one I am struggling with is the most experimental of the lot. While many of my pieces involve travel, this one actually travels back in time. It is taking shape, but the lack of clear references for it does make it a challenge.