Genius Loci Digest: 15 August 2025

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Now Open To All - My Paris Sketchbook

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If you've missed the previous two Digests on my visit to Paris - you can catch up here:

Words

"...whatever language means, poetry means more, whatever building means, architecture means more, whatever movement means, dance means more. The poetic is what makes us both natural and human.."

Hugh Conway Morris

Observations

Middleton, North Manchester. Grandad took me away from the cul-de-sac

I was born in North Manchester and was brought up in an industrial town on the outskirts of the Pennines. On many an occasion Grandad would take us out on trips in his VW Beetle across the border into Yorkshire. Out from the shadow of one of the tallest chimneys in Europe at Rhodes, we drove upwards and outwards beyond Blackstone Edge and into Ted Hughes country. I shall never forget the glimpse of the countryside in those halcyon days – framed by the lens of the Beetle’s curvilinear windows and the hum of the engine behind me.

Since then, half a century of life has passed by, and I’ve spent many a trip trying to re-connect with the emotions conjured up on those journeys.

Ironically, it took a journey of several hundred miles and a passport into another country – to reconnect with those Yorkshire days and the awe I felt as a child.

I’m standing in Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, visiting the remarkable David Hockney exhibition. Through his Yorkshire paintings, Hockney has worked a subtle magic – rekindling the beginner’s eyes of my childhood.

One series in particular has become a portal back to my younger self: Bigger Trees Near Warter - a series of three paintings from the same location. In Bigger Trees Near Water, Winter 2008, he has captured not only a place but an emotion - backlit by the burgeoning winter sun, a place poised on the cusp of light just as I was poised on the cusp of life.

In those years, grubby nose pressed against a car window, the horizon seemed endless. Hockney’s work, through its sheer scale and intricacy, is a reminder of how small our attempts at imitation are beside nature’s complexity, yet it still holds that same wondrous moment - when change is imminent, the day beginning in a fragile stasis, everything hovering at the tipping point, balanced on the fine thread between light and shade.

Art is far more powerful than we often give credence for. It reconnects us with our own inner landscapes and helps us re-vitalise them in an attempt to understand ourselves. It offers hope when the view seems narrow, helps us endure sorrow and sad times, reminds us of the wider world that holds us, and frees us - if only for a moment - from the many dimensions and distractions that claim us.

What I love about Hockney is that he never over-explains. His words are disarmingly plain, but the complexity of his vision is poured into the work itself. Each painting is a small act of re-alignment, showing me beauty in the mundane, reminding me that completeness doesn’t need to be bought – that it lives beyond cost-benefit in a Yorkshire copse or the blossom of a hawthorn bush.

Additionally, his portraits of people mirror truths about the human condition more sharply than a thousand books.

Through the frame of a tree, he helps me see what trees have meant to me all my life. And in the story of his life – the daily act of creating, the stubborn persistence, the imperfections worn without apology – he reminds us that being human, with all our flaws, does not close the door on wonder – it is part of what leads us to it.

I needed a passport to get to Paris to visit Yorkshire, but the real passport is that of Hockney’s art - giving me permissive rights to sense the freedom I had as a child and to take the joy of it all into adulthood.

Here in Paris, with his work all around me, I feel the cataracts of modern life thinning and, for a moment, the light streams in just as it did through the curved glass of my Grandad’s Beetle window, heading east into the promise of Yorkshire.

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Hotspots

The Fondation Louis Vuitton

Two Masters, One City, Shared Horizons

Stepping out from Hockney’s world, I found my senses lifted again - this time by Gehry’s building. Just as Hockney’s art had raised my way of seeing, Gehry’s sail-like facades seemed to gather me up. They cradle an entire rooftop platform where the city unfurls below. From here, the Jardin d’Acclimatation spreads out in a green tapestry on the edge of Paris. The experience is breathtaking. At one moment, the sheer scale made me feel like an ant in a colony; at another, the city seemed to lean closer, as if Gehry’s building were closing the distance between us.

I dream of designing a magnificent vessel for Paris that symbolizes France's profound cultural vocation.

Frank Gehry

Paris Unframed – From the Heart of a Village to the Weight of a Nation

Place de la Contrescarpe, Rue Mouffetard, The Panthéon

Place de la Contrescarpe is my lodestar in Paris - the point I always return to, whether for breakfast or supper.

It has a village feel, but also it feels like the hub of a great wheel, with Rue Mouffetard running away from it like a well-worn spoke, guiding me into one of the oldest surviving streets in the city.

Here, the pre-Haussmann street pattern still twists and folds upon itself.

Follow that spoke far enough and the mood shifts. The intimacy of Mouffetard opens into the civic stage of the Panthéon - all classical weight and measured proportion - a statement in stone that contrasts with the human scale of the streets that lead to it. The Panthéon is a mausoleum that holds Voltaire and Rousseau, Pierre and Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola amongst others.

Between the three lies a map of Paris in miniature: the familiar and the monumental, the everyday and the eternal.

Pure Scroll (No Words)

Place de la Contrescarpe

Rue Mouffetard

Place du Panthéon

Dad wasn’t well. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. So, in the early 2000s, to take his mind off things, we decided on a trip to Paris. When we arrived – while the rest of the family settled into the hotel – Dad and I walked to the Place du Panthéon.

The sheer sight of it lifted us. The way the square presented itself - the scale, the proportion, the materials, and the echoes of past civilisations - carried us out of the moment and beyond our worries.

And then we saw a pub.

“Do you fancy a pint, Dad?” I said.

“What, here?”

“Yep!”

And so we sat in The Bombardier, with a view of perfection: two remarkable buildings - Sainte-Étienne-du-Mont, and behind it, rising like a sentinel, the Panthéon.

Later (after a few pints), we wandered over to the portico of the Panthéon and looked out towards the Eiffel Tower. The city seemed to stretch away in layers of light.

“This is the best day of my life,” Dad said.