THE HAUNTED STUDIO: REMBRANDT
Homage to RVR
(in progress)
2006
Artist's Collection
Whatever he means to the young today, to my generation of
artists, figurative or abstract, Big Dutch (my nickname for my pal Rembrandt
Van Rijn) was a monument, an icon, what the French
call a "monstre sacré." One would need a heart of stone not to be moved
by his portraits, with their haunting ability to hint at the depths of the human
soul . His forty or so self-portraits in oil (many more in drawing and etching)
are unique in the history of art - challenged only by his fellow Dutchman, Van
Gogh, who couldn't afford to pay for models.
Rembrandt played a role in inspiring
me to become an artist, and my father, intent on dissuading me from that course,
said , "It's OK to be an artist, if you can paint like Rembrandt." In
recent years, I seem to have taken him literally - my first step toward taking
art history as a subject was to place one of his self-portraits in the middle
of an abandoned abstraction.
I'm not foolish enough to aspire to paint like Rembrandt,
but I apparently like to paint Rembrandt, and his wonderful, homely mug — its
weary traces of time and age through the years have been a friendly companion
to my own aging. Whenever he finished painting himself he would instruct students
in his workshop to copy his portrait, a teaching technique that helped to propagate
his style widely for many years. Reproductions in a book called, "Rembrandt
By Himself", based on a London exhibition of a few years ago, helped me
to
offer this humble tribute on his 400th anniversary.
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