The mild and moderate days of December winter have given way to an early February blizzard. We have been  at home for several days, skipped the studio visit, skipped the swim at the Y, and kept busy watching the snow plows go by, the banks of stuff  building up with each new pass of the big trucks that keep our roads safe for the die hards who have to get to work.

I am working on  ideas for my gallery talk which I will give at the Miller Art Museum in June, on portraiture and the history of its evolution. This means I have a stack of  things on the dresser, books on Farum paintings in Egypt, a biography of Chuck Close,  another on Lucien Freud, a book on the self portrait throughout the ages, and another on the Society Portrait. There are also books on silhouettes and another on  portraits in the age of abstraction.  Each morning I sip a cup of tea in bed and read, making notes on  index cards, in hopes that after a few weeks of this activity, I will have a
concise yet  comprehensive grasp of history and style, as well as a few interesting   stories on artists
that I have long admired but had little knowledge of. Its a self directed art history course I am taking, and I am re thinking the way art history could have been taught, approaching it from a thematic rather than a linear chronological approach. For example, Albrecht Durer was probably the first artist to paint a landscape for the sake of the landscape, not as an afterthought in a narrative about peasants or Icarus falling from the skies.  Artemisia Gentilischi was invited to live at the court of the King of England, where she was employed as a court painter.   Could we have a book on nothing but court painters??? Or how about a  talk on the artists who were all thrown in jail or sought by police for things like murder, theft, corruption... Courbet was forced to flee his home country, he died of malaria, while in transit to seek asylum from a patron. His paintings were banned from exhibitions. He missed the ferry he needed to catch, and that is where he  became ill. I took a number of art history surveys in college, and in grad school
I audited  the Renaissance class one semester just to brush up, but working in museums like the Blanden where I  shared space with paintings by Miro, Chagall, Beckmann and many other early
twentieth century greats, I had plenty of hands on experience albeit a generalist approach.