Sex in the City Paris by Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

Author:Maxim Jakubowski (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781907726361
Publisher: Xcite Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Gargoyles and Sidewalk Cafés

by Peter Baltensperger

Jacqueline was sitting comfortably on her fold-up canvas seat high atop Notre Dame where the gargoyles watched over the city with their enigmatic stone eyes. She loved the gargoyles. They were such mysterious creatures from so long ago, such distorted and grotesque beings from a distant era of architecture and popular beliefs that they inspired a deep feeling of awe and wonder. She loved sketching them, trying to capture their essence, attempting to derive some universal meaning from their existence, some personal insights from their bizarre faces, their misshapen bodies.

For a while, she just sat there on the balustrade, leaning against the ancient stone wall. She was content just looking up at them through the early afternoon light, waiting for the sun to come around a bit further and produce the patterns of light and shadows she wanted to capture on this particular day. Her carrying case stood on the stone floor beside her, her sketch pad balanced on her knees, her charcoal ready in her hand.

It was a perfectly pleasant spring afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, the sun still quite low and soft, the perfect conditions for plying her trade. All she had to do was to sit there for a while, wait for the light to change, and gather her thoughts, imagining the four gargoyles perched in the corners above her the way she wanted them to appear on her sheets of paper.

Then the light was just right and she started sketching with quick, determined strokes. Her eyes flitted back and forth between the gargoyle in her field of vision and the paper in front of her. Her charcoal danced over the paper as if on its own, as if independent from her hand, from her mind. Yet she knew exactly where she wanted the outlines and the shadows to go, how she wanted to delineate the stark profile, how to present the object of her fascination in the best light and to the best of her artistic ability.

Her strokes with the charcoal and the smudging of the black substance with her agile fingers seemed automatic and rehearsed. In actual fact, she concentrated so hard on her task that her hand sometimes trembled with the effort. Her heart and her mind raced inside her with the artistic impulses flooding her as she poured her soul, her very essence, into her work.

Curious tourists had begun to gather around her, watching her in amazement as she brought the piece of paper to life until the figure took on a three-dimensional look, an almost life-like shape. She was barely aware of them. She had become used to admiring onlookers over the years of her artistic career and wasn’t fazed at all by the growing crowd. She knew by now that she was very good at what she was doing and that she could please even the most discerning aficionado with her art.

She applied the final lines to her sketch, emphasized a shadow here, a

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