Tuesday, 21-Feb-12 23:09:00 CET

Grand Finale! Painting session of Hannie inspired by Amadeo Modigliani

On 18 January it was the last evening of the course of Model and Portrait 2011 at de Kunstlinie with Iwona. The course is running over into the new year but it started in 2011 so I would say it is the Model and Portrait course from 2011.

For this final evening the inspiration was Amedeo Modigliani. My instinctive idea was that this is not going to work for me. Especially the stylistic style of Modigliani was a bit much for me. On one side, I am right now in the middle of a period when I am trying to capture the reality as it is even though this is subjective but anyway and I am not trying to deformate it before I paint it. Not deliberately, as Mr. Modigliani did. On the other side when a teacher bring me things to learn from then I am so very humble to try to grasp  as much of it as I can because I am really eager to make use of any bit I can learn from. So this evening we painted according to the world of Amedeo in acrylic.

The model this evening was Hannie. She was wearing a shirt that she had inherited from her grandmother. Hannie is such a kind and pleasant model.

As far as the craftsmanship goes I did my routine as I am got used to and I did not perform beyond my average capacity so the result was okay but not extraordinary. I concluded that there is just so much you can achieve in two hours. It can be so that the things I need to improve right now in my painting of portrait and model they fall outside the scope of what you can achieve within a two hour lesson. You can also call it disappointment.

When the session had ended all the paintings was evaluated. Actually evaluation is a really tricky part of a painting session. At Aquarelmere we do evaluations at the end as well but there we don´t have any dedicated teacher. The group of Aquarelmere has got so well together that you actually learn much from the evaluation at the end. The evaluation at de Kunstlinie is of the more soft kind. Everyone is doing a great job and everything is beautiful. And that is also true. At the evaluation I concluded that I actually had been inspired by Amedeo Modigliani because the palette of the painting that Iwona had given as inspiration was reproduced in almost all of the paintings by the attendees of the course this evening. Interesting indeed.

I believe this is going to be the last course like this at de Kunstlinie for some time. On 9 November 2011 I found a newspaper article in “Almere Vandaag” about de Kunstlinie. It was said that  every year the building cost the taxpayer of the city 3.4 million euro, and this was from a report of Price Waterhouse Coopers. To pay the costs the rent of the house should be 4 million euro but the two organizations renting the house bring 660 thousand euro. That is less than a fifth of the necessary rent for the building. It had cost 70 million euro to build the house and the local government of the city have had extra charges of 14.5 million euro since the start. The two organizations, the city theater and the art and music course organization, renting the house pay what they were paying in the previous location. Price Waterhouse Coopers recommend the city to ask these organizations to pay what it costs for the houses because that is what other cities are doing. [Hahahaha PWC… Question for you: are other cities also having glass and concrete houses reaching out in lakes for theatre and for teaching art and music? No they don’t? Anyway] PWS are saying that the heating and cleaning costs for the renters are according to the expected. The locations are substantially larger than the previous housing. That makes the total costs higher as well. Also de Kunstlinie are renting more space than strictly necessary. De Kunstlinie are leaving the building and an external agency are investigating the consequences of this move.

Oh oh oh, how could all this happen? Elsewhere in the city I can see that the old city theatre building is being demolished and replaced with a shopping center so the theatre organization have no place to go back to. De Kunstlinie can find some school building or empty shopping center or whatever so they will probably manage.

So all in all ladies and gentlemen… It will take some time before all this has settled and found new forms. In the meantime I will move on and make art beyond the borders of what you can achieve in two hour sessions!