Day 3 and 4 in Amsterdam
Today was a thrilling day for my artist soul. I started with a two hour visit to Rembrandt’s house, now a museum with excellent audio guides and a couple of very informative docents, really more art historian and paint historian, popping into the rooms and delivering fascinating information. I felt very lucky to be able to go to this today and also to have more knowledge of oil painting than I did a year ago to better appreciate seeing Rembrandt’s studio setup and his tools.
A few highlights. It was cool to be looking out of the windows that Rembrandt also gazed through (the first photo is of a chair on a raised platform which allowed the person inside to see out the window and watch the passersby). Rembrandt painted many people in his neighborhood. I didn’t know that Rembrandt was an art dealer as well as a painter and that the ground floor first rooms were hung with paintings he was selling by artists other than himself. Many of these paintings are on the walls and on loan from various museums. I also didn’t realize that only two of his children survived past one years old and that his wife died a year after giving birth in her 30’s. He never remarried but got involved with his maid and then she moved out and he became involved with the next maid who gave him a daughter. Seeing the kitchen where he had had a fight with the first maid who wanted him to marry her (he refused) made me question if he was a decent human being. Artists are complicated. I think of Bach managing to somehow balance living with huge numbers of his children and being able to be in another zone entirely as a composer and organist in touch with a divine presence. Ultimately we live in a mortal and very demanding body and yet the soul is always asking us to higher expression. The inner need for transcendence is part of what gives rise to art and creativity. Below you can see various rooms in Rembrandt’s house including the chair on a platform so he could watch what was happening on the street, his studio with various props and easel, the gallery in the front entrance hall seen through an inner window on the landing, his room for doing administration, a portrait of him made by another artist, the token he was given that showed he had paid dues to the guild of Amsterdam painters, a bed cabinet and more of his props (or ones like what he would have had).
Rembrandt amassed huge numbers of things he wanted to use as props and sadly when he became insolvent, most of his possessions were taken from him and he had to leave the house and move to a more affordable place. I was fascinated by the beds which people slept in and how short they were. Apparently people intentionally slept sitting up because it was considered inviting death to lie more flat and stretched out. You can click now on any of the photos and they will get larger in a lightbox.
The highlight of viewing all the floors and rooms in the house was really Rembrandt’s large studio and watching a demonstration of how he mixed his paints and the pigments and where they were sourced. He used clays and powdered glass, crushed beetles, lead and black from carbon obtained from burnt bones.There are so many fascinating facts about what people discovered could be combined with linseed oil (made from flax seeds) and made into a paint with the most memorable today being the fleas on a certain cactus plant that when dried and crushed and blended with water then linseed oil make a vivid red which Rembrandt used. I also learned that raw sienna and raw umber and their compliments burnt sienna and burnt umber were actually burnt in an oven and therefore were dryer and faster to dry when mixed with linseed oil because the water had largely evaporated. These then made logical underlying colors to draw with before layering othe paint on top because of the fast drying quality. Another fascinating thing I learned was that modern paint purchased in tubes is very smoothly mixed and doesn’t have the complex reflecting of light which hand mixed pigments do. This means that Rembrandt’s paints still had more granules in them of the powders and therefore made the surface less smooth and more able to have complex light reflection.
I could go on and I’m sure my nerding out on paint mixing and also safety issues around linseed oil which I learned finally from Eric Armitage who makes his own paints and did this fantastic demonstration.
After leaving Rembrandt’s house, I wandered towards the Jordaan district to find lunch. It was about 2:30. To get from Rembrandt’s house to the Jordaan district which is the quaint and more artsy area, I had to get through the huge swath of tourist places and wider streets. Avoiding bicycles and cars made it more difficult for me to appreciate my surroundings since at every crossing and intersection, either a bike or several bikes, a moped or a car would be heading towards you from three directions, all at different speeds. An animal on the streets in Amsterdam really doesn’t have a long chance at survival unless they are a bird or a flying insect. Just my humble opinion.
I was looking for a place that had chairs looking onto a place I might be able to paint in my sketchbook, not a place in an alley or on a busy street. Eventually I found a cafe and sat down next to a man who it turns out is from Dallas, TX whose name was Nitesh. We fell into a very easygoing conversation for about an hour about all sorts of topics and we connected on LinkedIn and shared stories. When we both went inside to pay our bills, Nitesh went first and then turned to me and said he had paid for my meal. It was so wonderful to have someone do this as a surprise, especially as I am counting my expenses so carefully. I feel so happy that I am able to connect with strangers and there is a certain serendipity when you are wandering looking for a place to land.
A similar thing happened later on, but before I get to that, I stumbled past a stamp collecting store that was itself the size of a postage stamp. Inside was a man who had been working there for forty years and inherited the business from his Dad. We talked about stamp collecting and I bought a gift for the cousin I’ll be staying with in England who is an avid stamp collector. His picture is below.
The last stamp shop in Amsterdam - Martin Gerritzen
From there I wandered past the houseboat museum and found a perfect sketching spot looking out on a square next to a bridge. I had a Corona and pulled out my sketchbook and pens, pencils and paint and started working out the composition. Not long afterwards a family with two kids sat next to me and I offered them a chair I wasn’t using. The father was very jovial and full of exuberance and he and his wife had some easy banter. The wife asked if I would take a picture of them at the table and of course I said no problem. Eventually we all started talking about things and where they were from (Cleveland, OH) and what they were doing there (spending a week in Amsterdam and Haarlem) and more about their kids etc. etc. I felt so happy knowing they had this sort of positive seeming nuclear family and remember the feeling of safety when I was younger and we were on family trips. I recalled the feeling sitting at a restaurant with my sister and parents before I ever had any life of my own and they were my entire world. This wonderful family eventually left and I continued painting. An italian group came in and sat nearby and then started looking at my sketchbook. When they got up to leave the older man came over and said to me that I must be a professional artist and I said well sort of and it turns out he is a professional illustrator himself so that made me feel good. We exchanged knowing glances about I’m not sure what, maybe art?
And then the final part of the evening was not a cruise on the canals as I had hoped to fit in, but a fairly quick walk towards Bimhuis jazz venue on a quai about a mile from the Centraal Station. The group of musicians were excellent performers together and individually on their instruments and instead of the classical mashup from last night, this was all modern jazz very tightly arranged. I loved seeing how the four wind players smiled as each of them soloed and how they improvised so effortlessly. I thought it sounded like Dvorak met Branford Marsalis and they drank too much and then jammed together and then wrote it down and had this group play it for violin, viola, cello, double bass, drums, trombone, sax, clarinet and trumpet…and piano. After the concert I wandered in the sunset back to the train station where I found my way back to the airbnb after saying hello to three cats sitting by what I assume are their houses. Goodnight!
DAY 4 - a Bike Ride in the Country, the Holocaust Museum, More Cats, More Conversations with Kind and Interesting People, Tired Feet
Today is the solstice and the longest day of the year. It was overall a wonderful day beginning with another incredible breakfast spread made by Paul at the airbnb. Little Coco the toy poodle wasn’t there and it turns out they share the dog with another person and she wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Sad since I wanted to interact with her. The other dog was there looking very mournful and clearly just wanting food scraps. I think dogs and cats at airbnbs know that visitors are not worth investing in relationship wise since they/we are always leaving.
I left for Yellow Bike Tours down not far from Station Centraal and arrived and opted to upgrade to an ebike since I’ve always wanted to see what one of those was like to ride. Yes, it’s cheating, but it was really fun. The one downside was a squeak that happened constantly throughout the trip with every turn of the wheel. I got used to it eventually and convinced myself it was a bird. Our group was really compatible - two families from the states (Seattle and L.A.) with high school kids, a college student from Paris who didn’t speak much English and me. The group leader was terrific and named Lucas, and I got to ride and talk to him a lot of the tour which was fun. At the end he said he had never had such a friendly and interesting person on his tour and he wanted my first and last name. What is really strange with all these heart to heart meetings I have when I travel solo is that I know I will never see any of these people again. I’ll never know if they survive or what happens to them and it makes the interactions more poignant and allows me to be fully myself. Below you see Paul’s breakfast offerings with his labels of the spreads (just part of it), the map of our bike trip, our guide explaining how the miller set the blades of the windmill at different angles to show positive and negative events in the community, a cat hunting, a mini drawbridge in the town where we all had lunch, cats on the roof with sheepskin, a backpack hanging from the pole over the door (a sign that someone had successfully graduated from high school). Now that I know people do this, I saw a lot of backpacks hanging from flagpoles the rest of the day.
After this fantastic bike tour, I wandered slowly and sorely (the bike seat was like sitting on a block of plywood) off towards the area of the Jewish quarter and the Holocaust museum. This next part of the afternoon was emotionally challenging and I teared up several times from the emotion of being in the place where so many Jews were held before being deported and killed. The theater which the Nazis chose as their place to hold and separate children from their parents was later turned into a memorial for several of the people who died and also to those who survived. The hotel was torn down from the inside so that only the outside walls and facade remained and a movie played in the the entryway about what had happened there. In what is now a courtyard open to the sky, a tall monument was built over a star of David and on the walls were images of people who were mainly killed after being held in this theater which was stifling with no air flow, not enough water, food or bathrooms. I listened to many of the audio narratives of each of the people. Below you can see from left to right clockwise the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater, then the foyer of what is now a memorial to those held there for deportation (apparently around 40,000 Jews), a remarkable cat who lies in the foyer every day and seemed to me to be some sort of spirit guide, frames from the movies about what happened, the courtyard which used to be where the audience sat and where people were imprisoned until being sent to concentration camps, the photos of people who were kept there attached to the wall with a code that played their stories through headphones, A boy who was killed in Sobibor. When I crossed the road and went through the Holocaust Museum I was struck by the photos of so many of the men who were in work camps or waiting to leave deportation to go to some sort of camp where they were allowed to play games, get married, all a ruse before sending them to the death camps. They looked like they were just joking around with each other almost like a senior college photo. There is much more to say here.
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
“Hope is not God’s gift to human beings. Hope is only our gift to one another”
I left the museum and found my way to a place for dinner near the Rijkmuseum. A couple sat next to me and of course we ended up talking, mainly because I was needing to charge my phone since the external battery was already dead. It turns out that the woman is a songwriter and guitarist and performs all over the place with songs she writes. Her name is Kelsey Kluijtmans. https://kelseykluijtmans.com/en/about-me/ She offered to lend me her charger but it didn’t work with my phone. She and her husband just had a baby and she travels in a camper van to her gigs. She encouraged me to come to a concert they were going to at a nearby church of a 23 year old singer songwriter but I needed to try sketching and wanted to find another place to people watch before heading back across the water to sleep. It’s so healing to see couples who seem so smoothly fit together. She radiated a luminous quality. I suggested she write one of the women who performed in Clean Pete’s Classical Revue who is a cellist since she said she was looking for one. It turned out they had friends in common on facebook. Not surprising.
And finally I found the most perfect Wine Bar (Shirazamsterdam.com) along a canal and was able to do a fairly terrible sketch but I attribute this to there being really bad light, and where I was sitting and not being able to use my arm freely because of the crowd. I will do better as time goes on here. It’s been at least a year since I did any travel or sketchbook painting. The waiters were all in their 20s and joking with each other and moving so seamlessly and elegantly with everyone. It was beautiful to watch. I paid an extra 10 euro because I was not getting dinner, just wine and olives and nuts. I definitely want to go back there.
