I’m sending you my dirty laundry writes Courbet to his parents in 1839. Courbet is only twenty years old, a student at Besançon, and looks like the self-assured young man in this self-portrait (not the larger-than-life painter who once bragged that he drank two bottles of Burgundy, three bottles Continue reading »
A few years ago I was browsing in my favorite used book shop when I came upon an English edition of Charles Blanc’s Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin by Kate Doggett. She published this translation in Chicago in 1879 as Grammar of Painting and Engraving. I immediately bought Continue reading »
Foreword
In the summer of 2011 I began a lengthy email conversation with my main professor from graduate school, Barry Gealt. Barry is someone who’s continued to have authority to challenge me and I have always valued what I’ve learned from him; he’s been at least as influential to me since Continue reading »
The ways that the human mind manifests itself in creative activity are vast and various. People have theorized about and argued over modes of creative impetus for millennia. Artists and lovers of art are constantly attempting to plumb these depths, always looking for some elucidation Continue reading »
“White” was originally published January 16, 2009 on vschneider.wordpress.com
Two days ago at a press conference in Millennium Park, Mayor Daley warned residents about this week’s dangerously cold temperatures while at the same time announcing a new campaign to attract tourists from around the world to Chicago in the winter. Continue reading »
Recently I returned to the Musée d’Orsay. The first thing I did was to take the five floors up to the Post-Impressionist collection to Douanier Rousseau’s painting War. Last year I regretted not having taken a picture of it to use in the classes I teach at the Lab School because Continue reading »
…”arguably the least love-struck woman in all Western painting.” – Michael Fried
In his book Pictures and Tears, James Elkins explores the act of crying in front of painting—an act that if one is to believe him (and I do) strikes most academics to be as shameful as farting during an inopportune moment at the opera. Before writing, Elkins wrote to colleagues, Continue reading »
Sometime in the late ’80s, Tony Fitzpatrick opened an exhibition space in Villa Park. A year or two later, he moved it to the then desolate South Loop and eventually to the other end of the block on 13th Street and Wabash. Continue reading »
Over the last few years, while teaching at the University of Missouri, I’ve often played a few select minutes from the middle of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind for my students. I find that the film, though unrelated to art making directly, has a number of specific benefits to offer Continue reading »
This is me in the room where we read, where the kids do their homework, and where we put up the Christmas tree. This is the room where I phoned my dad a year or so before he died: we were both catheterized, me following an operation for postpartum incontinence and him because Continue reading »
