-My name is Sean Diediker, and I'm a painter.
I've always designed my paintings based on travel and chance.
I love exploring the human condition as I look to find beauty in true, unscripted reality and then documenting that experience with paint.
I love merging the craft of Old World masters with modern-day media to create and share unique windows into humanity.
Join me as I canvas the world to explore the interplay between art and the human condition, every episode a place, every episode a painting.
[ Wind rushing ] [ Match strikes ] [ Typewriter clacking ] [ Typewriter clacking ] [ Typewriter clacking ] -Okay.
The whole place has a crazy story because in 1994, it used to belong to a big bank, nationalized, belonging to the state, the Crdit Lyonnais, and the bank went bankrupt.
Big scandal.
And then for eight years, this bank had 200 buildings in Paris empty.
-200?
-200 empty buildings for 8 years.
One day -- We are squatters.
Artists squatting.
We don't have any money, so we are squatting in Paris.
We're looking, you know, to empty buildings.
One day, we find this, and we say, "This is not possible."
-"Oh!"
-Here in the center of Paris, you know, in the very center.
-Five minute to the Louvre.
And the city hall, two minutes.
-And we tried to come in, so we broke in by the window, by the rear window, first floor.
We climb.
We break in.
Of course, it was illegal, so we started with squatting.
We call -- All our friends are artists, so 30 of us, they come together here, and we start cleaning and everything.
The idea was to unite everything, art and life together.
We're living.
We are eating.
We're making love, everything.
We want to be as open as possible.
-Yes, it's important that it's so difficult to be an artist in Paris.
That's why we stole the building.
-Ever since the building was successfully stolen, 59 Rivoli has been home for transient creators.
It currently has 30 artists in residence.
And even the mayor of Paris offered his official pardon.
Oh, hello.
-Hello.
-[ Laughs ] -My name is Maitena Barret.
And I'm a painter.
And this is my work.
Talks about freedom because all of my work talk about freedom.
You can be what you want.
You can do what you want.
This subject is more people dancing because I like also to paint people when they are dancing or moving.
I need to know the person that I paint.
-You talk about intimacy with the subject.
I feel when you are painting someone you know, it's that moment in time where you're creating -- You're birthing a third person, which is that painting, so 100 years from now, when the subject is dead, and then you're dead, the painting still exists.
-Yeah, you're right.
-And so that is the... -It's exactly that.
It's exactly that.
-How did you come to be an artist here?
-When a permanent person leave, you can apply also to be permanent.
It's not so easy to find a place where you can work in Paris because it costs a lot.
It's open to the public six days a week from 1:00 to 8:00.
It means a lot, and it's for free, and the people can see people working.
I mean, there's just only one place in Paris like this.
-You might feel a little like Alice in Wonderland as you climb her grand staircase and decide which studio door to open.
And unlike visiting most galleries, at 59 Rivoli, you get to fully immerse yourself in the artists' universe.
[ Laughter ] [ Indistinct conversations ] -I was 17, 16.
I came to Paris first time alone.
And I went to Montmartre.
On the train to go to Montmartre, a woman came, and she was making portrait.
And she said, "It's forbidden to paint here, to expose here."
And I said, "Well, why is it forbidden?"
For me, it was crazy.
Paris, Montmartre.
The place where everybody came -- Modigliani, Picasso, et cetera.
"No," she said.
You needed permission.
I said, "Permission?"
For me, I hadn't heard anything about... My dream of Paris was totally destroyed in one second, you know?
And years later, I come back here after I make my art study in Germany, and I had the scholarship, and I came back to Paris.
It's empty.
What a shame.
Ten years, it was empty, this building, and so we say, "Let's go inside and make art and open the door wide away for the public," so that's what we've done.
It's our building.
It's a new Montmartre.
59 Rivoli.
-We want to have as many French as foreigners.
We want to have as many boys and girls.
We want to have aged and young people.
We want to have all kinds of different, like, painting, sculptures, and video and photography and performing and everything.
So we went to have the larger scale.
And here we are.
We're still here, and you're still here with us, friend.
-I know, I know.
-Yes.
-Isn't it crazy?
[ Woman singing in French ] [ Applause ] [ Woman singing in French ] -[ Laughs ] -Ah, fantastic.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
[ Woman singing in French ] -The creative crossroads at 59 Rivoli are so rich that oftentimes the old bank walls can't contain it, and it spills right out onto the street.
[ Woman singing in French ] [ Cheers and applause ] [ Cheers and applause ] [ Man singing in French ] -Whether your road begins or ends in Paris, the City of Lights has always been a beacon for the creatively ambitious, hoping to be consumed by her beauty and come out on the other side as a vehicle of inspiration themselves.
The Muse d'Orsay.
The idea was to create something in between the National Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre, and I believe they succeeded.
Not only do they have the best of the best in regards to its collection, but its intimate size allows visitors to see most of it in a single day.
The Muse d'Orsay, in my opinion, has a more casual atmosphere than most museums... and allows for visitors to get unusually up close and personal with its priceless treasures.
For me, one of those treasures was a self portrait done by Vincent Van Gogh.
I had seen it in books all my life but wasn't prepared for the effect it would have on me in person and prompted another journey to learn more about the master.
Only a few hours from Paris is the Saint-Paul Asylum in Provence where Vincent Van Gogh eventually ended up and, in my opinion, painted his greatest works.
He sold only one painting during his lifetime and yet still influences millions.
You can't help but have a deep respect for those that find their passion in life and seize it at whatever cost -- In Van Gogh's case, perhaps his sanity.
This is the very garden that Van Gogh did most of his best work.
How is it possible for a painter 100 years before my time to document his surroundings in such a humanistic way as to make me feel like I had traveled there in dreams?
And it's very easy to see how he could celebrate such simple things but translate them through paint into much more meaningful imagery.
And up there is the room that he stayed in when he cut off his ear.
I was surprised to learn that the Saint-Paul Asylum is still fully operational and many of its residents paint and display their work here.
Van Gogh has always had a huge influence on how I approach painting.
Many artists simply copy what they see, but Van Gogh was able to archive how his environment felt.
[ Bell dings ] [ Bell tolls ] In the heart of the city, at Kilometre Zero, the place where all French roads start, is a bookshop... started in the 1950s by George Whitman, an American journeyman whose travels inspired the core philosophies behind the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.
For the past 60 years, Shakespeare and Company has been an island of refuge for struggling writers and poets.
They're welcome to stay and sleep on the bookstore floor free of charge.
All that is required is a few hours of labor in the shop, and you must read at least one book a day.
Over the years, an estimated 30,000 people have stayed here.
Some of these include literary icons such as Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Richard Wright.
In my opinion, the beating heart of the bookshop is at the top of the stairs where you'll not only find the residents themselves but an eclectic wall of humanity.
Thoughts and photos of human tumbleweeds are weaved together, giving small clues of where they've been... and connections made.
Upstairs, I also stumbled upon Cecilia, a young writer and philosopher living at the bookshop who had recently vagabond her way from Denmark in search of her writing muse.
-It's called Shakespeare and Company, and it was founded... Is it called founder?
Founder.
By Sylvia Beach in the 1920s.
In 1951, George Whitman opened the store up again to build and create this space where writers would go and, um, become even more creative and have a place to stay and read and write and eat and live their lives through their words or their experiences.
If you want to stay here, you have to volunteer.
That means you have to be working here 2 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I've read more and written more than I've done for the past half-year, and I've only been here 10 days.
In 1990, on the 26th of July, I was born with my twin sister.
And, like, we were not born in the natural way as normal children are.
We're test-tube childs.
I usually love to sit in windows and write because, that way, I can be sort of indoors but looking at the world outside.
So it's sort of like a mirror.
It seems like a voyeurist thing to do, like, sort of what... Yeah, to watch people from a window.
But, like, they're all over Paris, these teeny, tiny things that nobody sees.
What I mean is just you can see the world go by, and you can still be a part of it and not be a part of it at the same time.
[ Typewriter clacking ] -"Canvasing the World" fine-art reproductions printed on pearl linen and museum-quality cotton rag are now available.
To order your own fine-art reproduction of "The Writer" or any editions from the "Canvasing the World" television series, please visit CTWgallery.com.
If you'd like more information on the series or a peek at what's currently on Sean's canvas, you can follow "Canvasing the World" on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter... or visit us at CanvasingTheWorld.TV.
-I'm here in Paris on a very romantic evening, a date.
I want you to -- Ah, with Bruce!
Paris was the first location I decided to shoot "Canvasing the World," and I went out there not knowing a whole lot about filmmaking, and it was definitely a challenge, and I had this new camera that took really good slow motion, and I thought, "If I could just get slow-motion video of birds flying, it would be just beautiful."
So I have all this footage of these slow-motion birds, which they make no sense now, but, you know, the things you think you know and the things you actually know later are quite different.
After my first visit to Paris, I was looking through the footage.
I had some good content.
This is our first shot with "Canvasing the World," and this is Swiss.
But I knew I would have to go back.
A few years later, Bruce, my producer, and myself, we went back to Paris, and we picked up on some of the stories that I had found initially, and we shot them much better.
We'll just leave it at that.
When I first got to Paris, I did not have an agenda.
I just wanted to see what things came to me, and I found that if I had the intention to go find these stories, they would actually find me, and that absolutely happened.
That happened when I met Cecilia, the writer.
It happened when I met the folks at 59 Rivoli.
Everyone had a story, and if you build the trust with the person you're trying to connect to, the stories just come.
-The 59 Rivoli shoot was really a special one because there was so many fantastic artists, and how willing they were to be interviewed and be part of what we're doing and support what we're doing.
And the spirit of the place was really quite magical.
-The frame on "The Writer," that is quite a unique frame.
I had a bunch of nonfunctional typewriters, but I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way to incorporate parts of a typewriter in a frame?"
I gave a box of parts to my framer, Rett Ashby, and about three weeks later, he brought forth the most magnificent frame made out of typewriter parts, leafed in 22-karat gold.
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