Been there, painted that
Elisabeth Masset, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman, has a very popular (and envy-stirring) post on Google Earth by which you can travel around much of the planet in the company of one of her lovely paintings.
Calling herself “zab_paris” on GE, Elisabeth has illustrated each of the 150 or so stops on the tour with a rendering of the location in watercolours, such as the one above from Amsterdam, that links to the larger-size image at her own website. She’s had more than 2,000 downloads, and I certainly hope her wish comes true that some of the viewers start buying her stuff. It’s quite an achievement.
But then Elisabeth does seem to be one of those dreaded overachievers who shames the rest of us without meaning to. She set up her own trilingual website and does likewise for others, does newspaper and magazine illustrations, draws comic strips and serves as a management consultant, specialising in municipal issues. She spent the summer of ‘98 motorycling around France – 11,000 kilometres of watercolour painting and discussions with town councillors (she was one herself previously) as an “experiment” in local democracy.
She also likes to ski, sing in choirs, play the guitar and jump out of planes, preferably with a parachute.
This Google Earth is her oyster.
Picasso’s done it again. His 1941 portrait of his mistress, “Dora Maar with Cat” (she must have freaked when she saw it) sold for $95,216,000, including commission, at Sotheby’s on May 3. That makes him the clear money-leader in re-sales, his “Boy with a Pipe” having fetched $104 million two years ago, knocking off the reigning champ, poor old van Gogh, whose “Portrait of Dr Gachet” sold for $82.5 million in 1990.
