A Young Woman Sleeping

You must hopefully know by now that I'm not just a fanboy for the panel arts, but a fanboy for art of the ages. As a teen student at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was enamored of Rembrandt and would visit his art daily at lunchtime. His published etchings and drawings were a constant source of inspiration. His 1654 sketch of Hendrickje Stoffels, below, never ceases to impress me for its qualities of light and mood, spontaneously accomplished with the few simple bold strokes of a brush with brown wash.

Aspirations

My mother was by no means an intellectual, yet she had aspirations to behave like one, bless her heart. When I was growing up, our home had art on the walls and sculpture on the furniture, even though many times we barely had enough to eat. I remember these two paintings were framed on the walls as prints for many years in her home. The Picasso print hangs in my home now, as of recently. All these years I thought the other print was by Rembrandt, and I'm pretty sure that's how it was labeled. But in looking it up, I see that it's really by Samuel van Hoogstraten, a Rembrandt pupil. Oh well.

Otherwise, my exposure to painting came from the books in our home, and much of the time the artwork was reproduced in monotone or line engravings—many of which I have yet to find full color reproductions of. But they stand as compositional studies and to this day are inspirational...bless their hearts.