A Sense of Place

In Love with Paris by Gérard Ramon

“With my drawings, I would like to invite you to walk with me along the river, to stride across its bridges, to sit on a terrace of a Paris bistro and watch the world go by, to discover or rediscover the city through the eyes of a Parisian. I tried to capture this mysterious “air de Paris”, this “je ne sais quoi” that makes Paris so different from any other city in the world. I didn’t think it possible, but with every new drawing, I was falling deeper and deeper in love with her, and I hope that you will, too.” —Gérard Ramon

Silk for the Feed Dogs by Jackie Mallon

“Summer and winter in Milan were as precisely defined as countries with different customs. In the summer, everyone came into the streets to look and be looked at, exhibitionistic in bright colours, black banished by all but the diehard fashion intelligentsia. Everyone moved hazily, the chaos of the city muffled as if by a big, overstuffed pillow. At aperitivo hour, ragazzi sipping foliage-sprouting cocktails spilled from the glitziest locales. Love at first sight struck left and right. The festivities slid into late-night round-tabled al fresco banquets with everyone talking at once. The Milanesi stormed the beaches at the weekend to tan the bodies they would flaunt the following week, and suffered the dreaded Sunday evening’s rientro, jammed for hours in motorway traffic.” —Jackie Mallon, from Silk for the Feed Dogs

The Last Island by David Hogan

“Surrounding me now in varying shades of gray were the bare mountain, towering majestically with a fire sparkling red and yellow; a half circle of lush colorless pines, bushes and shrubs fencing the cove and forming, at the entrance, the black tunnel to another world; the wet expanse extending from the dock and stretching to the curved horizon.  In the softness of the elapsed dusk with the low angle moonlight glancing in, the cove seemed the fountainhead of all the dark waters of the sea, nothing less than the sustaining and nourishing womb of all the earth’s oceans.” —David Hogan, from The Last Island