Parisian Palette of Dreams: An Artist’s Travelogue

City of Light, City of Art: I first arrived in Paris in the spring of 2017 — not as a young artist, but as a 40-year-old painter whose soul was ready for transformation. I stayed near Gare du Montparnasse, in a modest hotel tucked between patisseries and bookstores. Each morning began with the hum of city life and the aroma of roasting beans and buttered croissants curling up from the boulangeries.

That first walk to the Louvre was a quiet pilgrimage. The sunlight broke through the glass pyramid like divine intervention. My footsteps echoed through centuries of marble. I stood for a long time before Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, mesmerized not just by her smile, but by the intimacy of the space around her. Despite the cameras and murmuring crowds, I felt seen — truly seen. Her expression was not static; it changed as you moved. It was a lesson in ambiguity, in restraint.

Then came the Winged Victory of Samothrace — one of the first artworks that brought tears to my eyes. Standing at the top of the Daru staircase, with her wings stretching behind her, the stone seemed to breathe. She was motion carved from stillness, flight conjured from stone. It wasn’t just sculpture. It was myth, history, exaltation. I remember scribbling in my sketchbook: “Let my paintings move like she does — even when still.”

In the French Romantic wing, I stood transfixed before Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. The passion, the dirt, the raw heat of revolution leapt from the canvas. I saw not allegory, but urgency. The smudges of red felt like blood, not paint. In that moment, I realized that as artists, we don’t merely render — we revolt. I walked away with a silent vow: to paint not just what I see, but what I burn for.

Later that afternoon, I discovered Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. My body went cold. The monstrous scale, the drowned limbs, the desperation reaching skyward — all surrounded me. I remember tracing one twisted figure in my sketchbook, trying to understand how anatomy could express agony so viscerally. That painting haunted me, shaping how I approached my own work on human endurance, which would emerge years later in my “Endurance” series.

Musée d’Orsay — Impressionist Daydreams on the Seine

Across the river, the Musée d’Orsay welcomed me into the golden age of light and color. Inside that converted Beaux-Arts train station, the iron beams and clock windows cast cinematic shadows. It was there, among the Impressionists, that I learned to see light not as highlight or shadow — but as emotion.

Van Gogh greeted me like an old friend. His Starry Night Over the Rhône felt like a hymn. The sky wasn’t just swirling — it was alive, trembling. I stood before it until the security guard gently motioned me forward. A few steps later, I found Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (1889), painted from the asylum in Saint-Rémy. His eyes, so alive and tormented, seemed to ask me: “Are you ready to endure?” That day, I bought a reproduction postcard of it and kept it inside my sketchbook for years.

The Orsay also introduced me to Gustave Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers — a stunning portrayal of labor, of male bodies bent not in heroism but in the repetitive ache of daily work. The sharp shafts of light slicing across the parquet reminded me that beauty lies in the mundane, and that even sweat has grace.

I paused longest at Manet’s Olympia. There she was, naked and unashamed, staring directly at the viewer — not a muse, but a woman in control. Her defiance, her cold gaze, redefined the nude for me. I jotted down: “To paint a figure is to paint a mirror.”

In Monet’s cathedral series, I saw how form dissolves into atmosphere. In Seurat’s pointillism, I felt the joy of obsession. In Degas’s dancers, I saw movement as discipline. Each gallery was a workshop; each canvas, a professor.

Montmartre — Bohemia and the Brotherhood of Art

In Montmartre, where I often wandered after museum hours, I felt myself walking in the brushstrokes of legends. Each morning, I climbed the steep staircases past Rue Lepic to Sacré-Cœur, its alabaster dome peeking through the mist. I thought of Van Gogh, who had lived just down the hill on Rue Lepic, and of his walks through this same terrain. I imagined him carrying sunflowers through the chill.

I painted on park benches. I drank coffee where Toulouse-Lautrec once sketched on napkins. I watched street artists near Place du Tertre, noting how quickly their lines captured essence. It reminded me that sometimes, a single gesture can be more truthful than a whole palette.

At night, under the amber streetlights, Lapin Agile pulsed with song and memory. I sat quietly one night in the corner, imagining Modigliani and Utrillo arguing over absinthe, while I sipped a modest red wine and scribbled notes about the shadows on the ceiling. Art doesn’t wait for the studio, I realized — it unfolds in observation.

Centre Pompidou — Cubist Dreams and Modern Marvels

When I returned to Paris in 2023, I had matured. My brushstrokes were more certain, my palette more fearless. I made a deliberate pilgrimage to the Centre Pompidou, that rebellious factory of art, with its color-coded pipes and aerial escalators. Inside, the world of modernism cracked open.

Here were Braque’s fragmented violins, Juan Gris’s reconstructed bottles, and of course, Picasso’s analytical cubism, which has long lived in the architecture of my own work. Standing before Picasso’s Man with a Guitar, I saw not a figure but a rhythm. His palette of sepias and grays mimicked my own recent series, which explored fractured resilience.

Kandinsky’s Composition VIII took my breath away. Geometry as symphony. Circles, triangles, and shards of red all vibrating with spiritual intensity. I realized that abstraction, when done with integrity, is not cold — it is clarion.

And then, Duchamp’s Fountain. It mocked me, it challenged me. It made me laugh. It made me angry. I walked away uncertain, and that was the point. Not all art must answer. Some must provoke.

I ended the visit before Delaunay’s Electric Prisms, a swirl of colored orbs and modern life. I felt like I was inside a stained-glass carousel. If Van Gogh taught me emotion, and Picasso gave me form, Delaunay gave me motion — color in perpetual bloom.

Musée Picasso — In the Studio of a Genius

In 2019, I stayed near Gare de Lyon, during my exhibition at Galerie Métanoia in the Marais. Just around the corner was the Musée Picasso, housed in the elegant Hôtel Salé. Here, I didn’t just observe art — I walked into the residue of genius.

Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1901), painted just after his friend Casagemas’s suicide, stood out in aquamarine melancholy. I remembered my own seasons of grief. His Blue Period wasn’t a palette choice — it was mourning.

The museum’s treasures are abundant: the sketches for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the angular grace of Woman in a Chair, the powerful grief of Weeping Woman, the playful collages made from matchboxes and rope. I learned there that every material is valid if your intent is pure. I returned to my hotel that night and began a collage with found Metro tickets and wine corks.

The Palace of Versailles — Artistry in Opulence

Versailles overwhelmed me. The Hall of Mirrors, where sunlight bounced endlessly between gilded chandeliers and arched reflections, was a masterclass in scale. But what stayed with me most were the bosquets, the secret garden rooms carved into the landscape. There I felt the breath of time, of performance, of staged beauty. The air smelled of old stone and orange blossoms. I wrote: “Versailles teaches that art is not merely to be seen. It is to be entered.”

Bordeaux — In Vino Veritas, In Arte Veritas

In 2023, after my time in Paris, I traveled to Bordeaux seeking a slower kind of inspiration. The city welcomed me with its 18th-century limestone façades and contemplative pace.

What made Bordeaux unforgettable was my tour with Sophia, the luminous soul behind The Bordealis. She didn’t just guide me — she revealed Bordeaux’s soul. We wandered cobbled lanes, tasted craft tonics at Michel’s, and stood under the Grosse Cloche as she shared its secrets.

One evening along the Garonne, as the sky shifted to blush and ember, Sophia’s storytelling painted memory into the dusk. My daughter sipped cocoa. We stood together by Pont de Pierre. I thought: this is art — connection, color, stillness.

At the Musée des Beaux-Arts, I found Rubens, Delacroix, Renoir. But I also found art in the streets: a bronze city map, market stalls, and in the way Sophia wove history and feeling into every stone.

I wrote that night: “Paris gave me the vision, Bordeaux gave me the feeling.” Even now, the sketch of Michel’s café awning hums with that laughter.

Epilogue — My Reflections

Now, back in Mumbai, I often find myself pausing mid-brushstroke, remembering a shadow cast by a Parisian lamppost or the glint of sunlight on the Garonne in Bordeaux. I paint, but my mind travels. The echoes of museum halls, the scent of coffee rising through Montparnasse mornings, the soft footfalls on the parquet floors of the Musée d’Orsay — all these linger like pigments on a well-used palette.

Paris and Bordeaux did not merely influence me — they transformed me. Van Gogh taught me to bear pain and still paint stars. His resilience — raw, vulnerable, unyielding — remains my greatest inheritance. I remember reading his letters at night, in the silence of my hotel room near Gare de Lyon, feeling as though he had written to every struggling artist across time. “To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life,” he said. In his palette, there was faith. In his brushstrokes, there was survival.

Picasso taught me to break form and fear. From his Blue Period to Cubism, his refusal to remain in one style taught me that reinvention is not betrayal — it is evolution. I have learned not to fear transition. Each phase of my work now holds room for rupture, and space for surprise. His words return to me often: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

Paris itself taught me to see. To see beauty in decay, structure in chaos, lyricism in even the mundane. A broken chair in a Montmartre alley, a pastry case in a dimly lit patisserie, a child’s crayon drawing on the back of a café receipt — these are no less art than what hangs at the Louvre. They are simply unsung.

And Bordeaux — Bordeaux taught me to feel. To slow down and sip, to listen to a story as if it were music, to treat a walk as a composition. Sophia, with her quiet, generous storytelling, embodied the kind of art I wish to make: intimate, textured, rooted in place and memory.

In my studio now, the walls bear traces of all these encounters. A print of Olympia sits beside a charcoal sketch I did of a Bordeaux café. A postcard of Kandinsky’s geometric chaos rests next to my own oil study of fractured silhouettes. Even my materials have changed — I now work more with collaged textures, with Bordeaux wine labels, with found ephemera from those travels.

Art is not simply what I create anymore. It is how I live. It is how I pay attention. How I remember. How I endure.

What began as visits became pilgrimages. What began as looking became becoming. Paris and Bordeaux are no longer destinations in my past — they are active participants in my present. In every canvas I paint, they whisper. And I, with brush in hand, answer.

That is the promise of art. That it travels with you. That it deepens with memory. That it gives you not just a language, but a life.. Van Gogh taught me endurance. Picasso, reinvention. Paris taught me that art is not confined to canvas — it lives in mirrors, wine, cafés, sorrow, courage, and rain.

To be an artist is to live artfully — with passion, resilience, and a heart open to wonder. That is the most inspiring lesson Paris ever gave me.

Next Week: My first visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

About the Author: From Boardrooms to Biennales: Dipayan Melds Two Worlds in a Singular Creative Journey

With over two decades at the forefront of digital transformation, Dipayan has advised Fortune 500s and global enterprises across Asia Pacific, EMEA, and the Americas. His consulting practice — deeply rooted in emerging technology, data, and AI — has been recognized through a U.S. patent in cognitive AI and blockchain-based identity systems.

Yet Dipayan’s vision doesn’t end in strategy rooms. For more than a decade, he has also carved out a parallel path as an internationally acclaimed abstract artist. His works — poetic, bold, and philosophical — have graced museum walls and gallery floors in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dubai, and major Indian cities. With awards from Florence and Venice, his paintings now reside in private collections across New York, London, Kolkata, and Mumbai.

Residing in Mumbai, Dipayan continues to bridge two seemingly disparate worlds — technology and art — offering a rare synthesis of logic and lyricism, strategy and soul.