What Can I Learn From Rembrandt? - Monday, Week 38 (12/10/2020)

Dani's back!!! Yay!!! She's doing better, 20/20 vision again (which doesn't really help my case so why am I celebrating?) We're still in the middle of a move, but here's the first of last weeks vids!

We start off this week with our new theme, which if you guys enjoy can be a recurring one. We're going to call this week "What I can learn from..." The idea is that when we do weeks like this one, we can reflect upon one artist for an entire week and think about five different aspects of their work. This week we will focus our attention on the greatest painter ever (this is completely objective, no need to argue here) Rembrandt. And for today, we will start with Self-portraits. Rembrandt is arguably one of the greatest portrait painters ever, but more importantly, one of the greatest artists ever to shift his gaze onto himself. What makes a great self-portrait? A simple answer would be looking at oneself with honesty. But what does honesty mean? Does it mean crudeness, vulnerability, compassion, pride, empowerment? Hmmm tough to say. Because we can never predict how we're going to look at ourselves in our future. But perhaps honesty just means trying to come to terms with how we see ourselves. How our experiences have shaped the manner in which we embrace ourselves. And this is where Rembrandt shined. He depicted himself as a human being, almost unworthy of being painted, seeing as how historically a portrait intrinsically suggested an elevation of sorts. So today we think about what it means to look at ourselves as if nobody was watching. A painting about ourselves done not for others but for ourselves.

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For a hi_res version of today's painting, please follow this link!