One of the reasons I love paintings is that they can trigger memories, sometimes even more effectively than photographs. Perhaps it is because the artist can bring to the composition his or her feeling about the scene being painted. Furthermore, light can communicate as much as composition. When I saw this painting by the Danish artist Carl Vilhelm Holsoe (1863-1935), it spoke to me immediately. At first, I thought it was because it stimulated the storyteller in me: the girl lives in a house where it is difficult to find enough light to read by. Thus, she has scooted her chair close to a window so that she can read her…
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Seeing Something that Hasn’t Been Seen for 400 Years
Sometimes we only see what we’ve been told to see. What if there is something entirely different to see? During 7th grade, Natalie and I enrolled in a magnificent class on the artist Rembrandt with Zhenya Gershman, an artist-educator who was teaching at the Getty Center at the time. She warned us that we might become addicted. To Rembrandt that is. She was right. That is why I found myself, two weeks ago, snaking up the winding roads above Sunset Boulevard to her studio. I was sitting in on another Rembrandt class she was teaching (as it was a school day, I had to promise Natalie I would tell her…
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Atlas: Our Virtual World Cruise
This post is for Zora, who is on her own home-school adventure during middle school. She learned about our website and wrote to me to tell me that she loved the idea of going on a virtual world cruise and was going to do the same thing. Tonight I received an email from her with more detailed questions about our cruise. Thus, this post includes pages from the Two in the Middle manuscript so that Zora can add fun “excursions” to her cruise. I’m crossing my fingers that Two in the Middle finds a publishing home soon so that our story can help inspire others to rediscover their own love of…