Dutch Boy, Big City

Click image to enlarge.

Since my last post, my hand has been recovering, which has kept me from drawing as much as I'd like, but I'm back at it, and you can get a fuller idea of what I've been up to on my instagram, link to the right.

One of the big things I've been up to, though, was teaching an advanced honors elective at LIU Brooklyn, in the Honors College, this past spring semester.

It was a course that I conceived and designed, and I'm very proud of it. The students were excellent. They were not art majors, in fact most of them are in the sciences, so they had to stretch a bit to get comfortable looking at, and talking about, and writing about, art. And they stretched themselves admirably. It was a blast to teach. I'd love to figure out a way to do more of this kind of thing.

This was my basic pitch for the course, as written in the image I designed, above:

  There are only about thirty-five paintings currently attributed to the beloved 17^th century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer -- and New York City is home to nine of them, far more than any other city in the world. In this class, we will use a focused study of the New York Vermeers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection to learn about his enigmatic life and intimate work,  and the extraordinary Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, a dynamic period marked by remarkable achievement in arts and sciences, and by political, economic, and religious forces which still reverberate today.

In order to help demystify the practices of the European tradition of oil painting, we will have hands-on considerations of the studio practices of Vermeer and his contemporaries, examining how paintings are constructed, both on canvas and on panel, how paint is made, and how it is used. We will analyze composition, materials, subject matter, technique, and iconography, and we will investigate the theories that Vermeer used optical aids in his work.

Then, to find out how our fine city came to be so flush with Vermeers, we will examine the provenance of the paintings and the rediscovery and meteoric rise in estimation of his work in the 18^th century. An examination of how the Met and the Frick acquired so many paintings by Vermeer will also help us understand both the benefits and costs of American ambitions at the time. Also, in a true crime twist of the plot, we will look at the more sordid history of forgery, theft, and fakery connected to his work.

There is no shortage of historical and critical lenses through which we can view Vermeer’s work, but during the course of the semester, we will always place the premium on the sheer visual and intellectual pleasure that his paintings bring, and how they continue to hold a magnetic place in both specialized and public imaginations. 

I want to reflect a bit more on the course, and teaching in general, so I hope to write more about the experience in this space. I learned a lot about Vermeer, painting, teaching, history, humanity, storytelling, young people, and myself.