Art de Vivre

Living life is an art. Every day, we carve our way out of the clay block, paint our way into an expressionist landscape, and capture the dreamy scene in our memory before it fades into the past.

Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing like a dream to create the future,” and that’s exactly what we’re doing with Mittie in Paris. A climax of creative collaboration, we know full well that “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” The time to create is now!

French sculptor Rodin explains, “Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.” We are animated through the art that is our life! Like Rodin, we invent nothing, we rediscover.

Looking back over life, a glance down the hallway of what was, a burning question of what will be … how do we define ourselves? what is it to exist? French filmmaker Chabrol plunges into the depths, saying, “I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things.”

Beyond the surface, deep into the human experience, existence is letting go. Free as a bird on the currents of a windy Parisian day, Simone de Beauvoir exclaims, “I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

Simone defined an entire movement with her radical ideas of freedom and expression. “I am incapable of conceiving infinity,” she said, “and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”

She continues, saying, “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.” Beauvoir was fearless in her quest for authentic living, for an authentic voice. “Change your life today.” She warned, “Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

We won’t waste a second on inauthenticity. Art is in the living, creation in the existing. American poet Gertrude Stein, from her parisian home away from home, suggested that the magic happens when you don’t try. “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” Letting go of pretense, you relax into your truth.

Meanwhile Rodin took a more incendiary approach. “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born,” he said “the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” Fearless in the face of uncertain outcomes, the art of life moves itself. The result? An unknown masterpiece.

As Gertrude Stein said, inspired by the artistic creations that Paris is known to spark, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” We couldn’t agree more! Paris is the city to mastermind your grande oeuvre d’art – which is to say … to live your true, authentic life.