Llama and Lamb

While wondering through Het Rembrandthuis Museum, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands last autumn, a painting caught my eye.  The walls of the Rembrandt House were covered with paintings salon style, and although it was hard for the eye to isolate any image, this particular painting caught my attention and held it.  The painting, The Last Supper, by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1664) , was on loan to The Rembrandt House Museum from the Rijksmuseum.  The painting resembles Rembrandt’s style because the artist was not only a pupil but also a friend of Rembrandt.  Another interesting thing about the painting was the  way that the artist reinterpreted the subject matter.

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While in The Hague, Netherlands last autumn, I took a few hours to look into the Escher Museum (Escher in het Paleis or Escher in the Palace).  In the past I have not regarded M.C. Escher too highly, consequently I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing the work.  I discovered how the following things that fascinated Escher also interest me: cylindrical reflections, patterns, and objects transitioning or changing within an image… To read the rest of the blog go to RachelSteely.com.

This past fall I had the opportunity to see several early Piet Mondrian paintings in the Gemente Museum (Den Haag, The Netherlands).  Although he is most famous for his later simplified Neoplastic art such as Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red, 1937-42, I prefer his earlier works that have a concrete subject and yet contain a graph like pattern to them.

Although His earliest landscapes are a type of subdued Fauvism, they are nice.  I like Oostzijdse Mill in Moonlight 1894-1907 in particular because although it is very dark, it is simple with subtle shifts in tone and color.  The lines are not perfect and it has a shifting appearance suggestive of the presence of a darkened setting.

There are a few pieces that represent a shift in his work, and they link his earlier style with his later well-known paintings.  One that I particularly found myself drawn to is entitled Mill in the Evening 1917.  This is another night picture, and has the dark subtle hues of the earlier stated landscape while simultaneously introducing the viewer of the painting to a reduction of nature into basic shapes. I am fascinated by the way in which he breaks the cloudy sky into a grid.  The implied grid lines are light and it is the reverse of his later famous black lined “grid” paintings.  This work gives insight into how this gradual transition from the natural to abstract took place.

Images, photographs, visual advertisements, logos, and even “fine art”. We are bombarded with pieces of visual communication. In each image, there is a message. However, there are so many images that we become numb to them. We soak up the message without either realizing it or taking the time to diagnose the meaning and agree or disagree with it. It is not possible to individually interact with all of these messages.
Should we sift through and find images that have a more lasting impact?

A student of images may learn to categorize the images upon first impression and then engage the ones that for some reason draw the viewer’s attention. However, the problem with this is that these images may tend to be “journalistic” in nature. When this is the focus of the work, then it will often, like the newspaper, drop away from importance soon after. Another person may be drawn to particular subject matter and averse to other subjects. This is dangerous because it immediately cancels out possible works that are significant in or beyond their first impressions.

The average person is not a student of images. Due to the immediacy of our culture, this individual wants to get no more then a phrase out of it. Someone has made the point that in our culture language has broken down over the past hundred years. No longer do we find long and elaborate sentences in books or long elaborate sentences in letters. Our culture texts. I have heard that the average sentence has become shorter. This same effect has also occurred with the visual image. Often times instead of a thousand words, it seems to shout a phrase or idea.

Does this shortness of thought in communication reflect shortness in the depth of our minds? Length of words does not equal impact or profoundness. (Often times it is the opposite.) Still, length of time engaged in thought may affect how thoroughly we understand ideas.

Take a moment today and search for a meaningful image. Discern what you are looking at. Search for the meaning and look for the intention of the person putting the image in front of you.