
Recently, I was in Amsterdam with my spouse for two weeks. It was a bit of an extravagance. I had read an article saying that Amsterdam now has more vegan restaurants than Portland, Oregon. I had never visited the Netherlands, and I really wanted to see some paintings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. I also hoped the trip would shake me out of the slump, or state of low inspiration, that I had been going through for the past two or three months.

When we checked into our hotel, the receptionist was surprised that we were staying for such a long time. Apparently, most people stay only a few days. They don’t just want to visit Amsterdam; they want to visit many cities in the Netherlands, and possibly elsewhere in Europe as well.

When I visit a place, I like to stay as long as possible. For one thing, when going to Western Europe from Eastern North America, the jet lag ruins the first five days. I also find that visiting too many places at once causes them to blur together in my mind. I like to take my time and get a feel for the atmosphere of a place, its architecture and how people live there, even if this means visiting fewer places overall. Traveling keeps me away from my studio, but it energizes me artistically by providing me with visual input. When I travel, I do a lot of sketches, from life or from memory and imagination, and sometimes, if the situation allows it, I also do watercolour sketches or paintings. (I find it cumbersome to travel with oils.) I don’t normally go to tourist attractions, unless they are something visually interesting, such as an art museum or a castle.

On this trip, I visited the Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s house, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Mauritshuis in the Hague. I was somewhat underwhelmed by the first three, probably because I was struggling from a temporary, jet-lag-induced depression when I visited them.
The Mauritshuis, on the other hand, was something of a miracle. I didn’t know, when I went to the Hague that day, that the Mauritshuis was there, or that it contained Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. I had merely read online that when visiting Amsterdam, one should also see some of the nearby cities, and the Hague was one that had multiple vegan restaurants. (I love going to vegan restaurants. I often travel to a place just to go to its vegan restaurants and am then pleasantly surprised by its architecture and everything else it has to offer. People think vegans never eat any good food. They have no idea.) Foolishly expecting to find a picturesque little town, my spouse and I were somewhat disappointed and decided, after lunch, to return to Amsterdam on the next train. On our walk back to the train station, we happened to come across the Mauritshuis, completely by accident. It was magical. The museum wasn’t very crowded; we had just the right amount of time; and I got to see multiple beautiful works by Rembrandt and two of what are in my opinion Vermeer’s best paintings.
I also saw, at the Mauritshuis, some strongly suggestive examples of the phenomenon of paint darkening that I wrote about earlier. There were still lifes where the artist had painted, for example, a transparent glass goblet, but the goblet was almost invisible. Clearly, the lighter pigments that the artist used have darkened. Similarly, there were bouquets of flowers painted by different artists, in which the flowers were impossibly red and the sunflowers, which should be yellow, or leaves, which should be green, were close to black. Clearly, the yellow that was originally in the flowers, sunflowers, and leaves has either disappeared or darkened.
I’m including a few of the sketches I did during the trip. (Please excuse the low quality of the images.) With the exception of the ink-and-wash drawing, which I did on cotton paper using Tom Norton walnut ink, they are all sketches from my travel sketchbook. All the drawings were done directly with ink on paper, without any initial underdrawing in pencil. I find that an underdrawing removes all spontaneity from a drawing. Even a sketch, if it is to come alive, needs to involve some risk. Perhaps I will write more about this another time.
