A Little Dose of Culture for Chowhound the Barbarian

We went to Vancouver to see the Vancouver Art Gallery's "Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Marsterpieces from the Rijks Museum" exhibit. Wow, that was a mouthful. I am not sure exactly how many pieces they had on exhibit but they had a fairly good selection of mostly oil on canvas paintings then they also have some silverware, glass and china from the 17th century. I guess the billing of Vermeer and Rembrandt together is a little bit misleading because they only had one of Vermeer's work and 5 of Rembrandt's. Mind you, there are only 31 pieces of Vermeer's paintings in the entire world. When you look at "The Love Letter" and see how completely captivating and perversely intriguing it is, I guess it is definitely worth it. Maybe perverse is too strong a word but the illusion of perception and depth in the painting created the feeling of watching and spying on the two characters. The Love Letter is a painting of some rich biatch receiving a seemingly elicit or okay highly anticipated letter. I prefer the word elicit though because of the hush hush super secret yet totally thrilled expression on the two women's faces especially on the rich woman's face. It's a small piece but the detail is amazingly well done because you can see the emotions on the character's teeny tiny faces.

Then of course there were the 5 Rembrandts, well, four actually because one of them is a just a pencil sketch. Not that a pencil sketch isn't interesting but come on! I want the real stuff! Rembrandt did a lot of portraits and his work has some sort of a dark, sombre and kind of eerie feeling almost. One of my favourites would be The Young Monk; it is said to his son Titus. I don't know what it is about that painting, it's not creepy or anything, but more like dark in a mystical way. Then there was "The Beheading of John the Baptist", argh!!!! super super super creepy. The title of course tells you exactly what it is but the expression on the ashen coloured face of the decapitated head of "John the Baptist" will totally give you goose bumps and so will the anguished face of the person holding the head. Huh! Super creepy! But I loved it.

Mr. Cat kind of dragged me away because I kept going back and forth, back and forth to some of the pieces that I found completely intriguing like the opportunistic cat in Nicolaes Maes "Old Woman Praying". I totally love that cat because as the old woman prays for god to make things happen, the cat is actually making things happen right that very instant, trying to have a go at the old woman's salmon. Anyway, we ended up in an Emily Carr/Jack Shadbolt exhibit on the second floor. The exhibit is like an Emily Carr/ Jack Shadbolt death match. I'm soooo soooo sorry for saying this but I think Emily Carr is completely overrated. What's up with the depressing green? I can understand that her favourite subject is the forest and well of course tree but come on, there's has to be other subjects in the entire universe other than trees and totem poles with their creepy faces. And the green thing? Seriously, there has to be a way to mix paint and make a happy kind of green. I don't get it why Jack Shadbolt was kind of an obsessed and possessed prisoner of Emily Carr's tradition. He seemed so violently insecure about her work. If you look at his stuff really closely, you might think that some of them are actually hers. Then as he gets, I don't know older or maybe his artistic sensibilities mature, his work progresses into a really nutty divorce from her tradition. You can just tell how he struggled so hard to exorcise himself of Emily Carr's influences. Jack Shadbolt tortured himself for nothing I guess, because Emily Carr's work is just plain dowdy, predictable and super boring while he has depth and versatility. Artists I guess can be really insecure and just be completely nuts.