Scattered Thoughts About Art, Culture and my Adventures in them

If you were planning a trip to the Netherlands early this year, now is the time to start making your travel arrangements. For, starting this week, February 10, 2023, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is opening the most comprehensive exhibition of Johannes Vermeer paintings to date, with a show including 28 of the artist’s paintings. Considering that the great master of the Dutch Golden Age supposedly only made 40 to 45 paintings in all his life, and that only about 37 of those are still in existence today, this show represents one grand retrospective of this illusive artist of the 17 th  century.    Born in 1632 in Delft, the Netherlands, he lived a reclusive life in poverty there, and died in 1675, at the young age of 43. If he ever managed to paint a self-portrait during those years, that has been lost. We still today do not know what he looked like, but that has not detracted from making him one of the most recognized, and recognizable artists of all times. His paintings h...

I want to introduce to my readers a great Chinese painter I have discovered recently, and whose paintings I very much admire. The painter is Han Yuchen, a man celebrated in his own country as a grand master, and recognized internationally for his multidimensional work, which includes poetry, photography, Chinese calligraphy, and European-heritage oil painting. Yuchen was born in 1954 in the Chinese province of Jilin, and showed early signs of a great talent, so that, while still a teenager, he was able to apprentice near some of the best artists of the time and take art classes in engraving (under Li Hua) and oil painting under Su and Liang Yulong. But he was forced to end his art studies when, during Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), his family was forced to move to the countryside and, apparently because of the family’s politics, he was unable to pass the “political examination” that would allow him to pursue formal art studies, until 1978, when he already was 2...