There is a painting we stumble upon in the National Gallery by Giovanni Bellini called Doge Leonardo Loredan. It is a stunningly lifelike portrayal of a man dressed in an exotic silk brocade jacket with a high neck. His posture is absolutely erect and his gaze is off to one side, avoiding the viewer. He wears a hat of the same fabric as the jacket that has a wide band of another fabric circling his head, and the hat rises into a point at the back looking almost as if a duck was resting on his head and we were seeing it from the back. Under the hat his head is bound in a white fabric that covers his ears and has two threads dropping to his shoulders under each ear that look as if they could be used to tie the head piece under his chin should there be a strong wind. He looks to be between 45 and 60 and has a thin, well-chiseled face with a strong nose and mouth set in an expression of confidence but neither smiling nor frowning. Bellini was a master colourist and in this painting he uses a stunning shade of blue for the background, a flat blue not meant to imply the sky or anything other than maybe a wall in a room, but even that might be a stretch. To me, it is Bellini choosing the blue because of its colour and the way it helps to bring the painting to life. One is immediately moved by the skill of the artist in creating this image, and capturing the specific nature of the Doge who was the leader of Venice. A serious man with great responsibility. I had seen the painting in reproduction, in an outstanding reproduction of the highest quality and framed in a subtle wood frame with a grey tint to the wood. The reproduction had hung in a hallway at the school where I taught for a number of years and once when they were cleaning and painting the walls and the reproduction was taken down I picked it up and took it to the art studio and hung it there. I had put up a few pictures, another sketch in conté by Bellini, a self-portrait, and a study for one of the children in The Virgin of The Rocks by da Vinci. These pieces were at the pinnacle of draftsmanship and the ability to represent the subject, and they stood as an unspoken challenge to the students working in the studio to always strive to do their best work. Seeing the painting made me think about the years I spent working in the school, the years I spent teaching in the art studio, the students I had taught and where some of them are now. One was in London having just finished a Masters of Fine Art at Central St. Martins; we were scheduled to have dinner together the next evening. She is now a friend and a fine artist. Over the course of my career there had been the joy of teaching and of seeing the work the students were producing and the way in which they were comfortable and in touch with their real selves in the studio. A number had gone on to careers in art or architecture, design, photography, fashion, film, curatorial, or academia as art historians. When I taught I tried never to think of the implication of what I was doing, of the way I was working, and the impact it was having on a student’s life and the direction that life might take in the future. The atmosphere in the studio was my creation and my gift to the students, allowing them to develop their abilities without fear of being attacked or belittled. Now that I no longer teach young people I have begun to take some pleasure in thinking about what I accomplished, the direction taken by so many of my students in their lives and careers, and how art is at the core of so much of what they do. It was a revolution of the personal —the personal is political as they say. It was focusing on the individual and having the art-aware and art-positive individual go out into society as an art-citizen, and become a force in their own right for the place of art in the broader culture, for bringing art to the forefront and having it recognized as essential in a culture that for so long has relegated art to the periphery.
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