It is a thankfully uneventful journey home, and I arrive back in Vancouver with my head and a diary filled with thoughts about all that I had seen during my whirlwind tour. Other than receiving complaints from my cat about my absence, nothing seems amiss at home. Admittedly I find it hard to pick up my duties after such an amazing trip, and I now wish I could spend my entire day writing about my experience. Over the next few weeks I will be sifting through those discoveries and considerations I made in order to distill them into a range of topics and issues I can study further. Part of it will be transcribing the diary I wrote in since I couldn’t take a laptop into the galleries – let’s hope I can read my own writing. This will not be a purely academic exercise (God forbid), but rather a personal response to Vermeer from what can only be my modern-tinted eyes.
I line up my postcard copies of Vermeer on my bulletin board, twelve in all from my US trip, added to the eight I saw in Holland – making 18 my total so far. They are like trophies, all purchased from the museum giftshops that offer the images of their collections on everything from magnets to ties and puzzles. Two postcards are missing, one due to its popularity so that the shop had run out, and the other, most likely due to its doubtful attribution (Girl with a Flute). 18 down out of the 34 plus, barely half way. The next trips will be expensive ones since they are scattered like satellites throughout Europe’s main capitals: Paris, London, Vienna, Dublin. One exception will be “Woman in Blue reading a letter” which is out being cleaned until 2012 when it will reappear in JAPAN! These paintings are like superstars, travelling on world tours. I will have to consult with the finances to see when and what the next few trips will be like. In the meantime I have lots of raw materials to work with.
Inpursuitofvermeer's Blog 