In June my sister and cousin came to visit. My sister just graduated with her degree in art so in addition to Amsterdam they went on a grand tour of Europe, namely France, Spain, and Italy. Those would be the places to go in my book! I joined them for a weekend in Rome and had a really profound experience.

I am an artist of some sorts and I'm in the middle of an artistic crisis... I studied b&w darkroom photography at university and have been drawing and creating art for my parents home since before I could walk. But since living here in Amsterdam I've been stuck. Not stuck in a swing of bad art which I'm used to those patches. But no art at all. Every picture I take looks like a postcard I've seen in a shop on Dam Square. And even when I do manage a photo or too I realize that all my experience in the darkroom is not helpful when it comes to Photoshop. I'm a novice.

I've even tried the comfort of paint but that's not going much better. At this point my only creative point in the day comes when I choose my clothes in the morning, draw on my makeup, and occasionally bake a cake. I'm experiencing a massive case of writers block for artists. How do you create when you're living in a place that's been so over-duplicated? I long to not make just pretty art but real conversational life art. So, I fled to Rome with my sister to see what would happen there (yes, I'm a bit dramatic...)







I looked around the city; the history architecture, beauty, food, people, my sister amongst the food and people. And it was refreshing and new to me. I began to feel in my groove, to remember why I adored my 50mm lens. And that was nice, but what struck me the most were a few small rooms in the Vatican Museum devoted to contemporary expressions of religious themes. A hundred years ago the pope at the time realized that there was a sad lack of modern art in the museum, so he put the word out and welcomed work from known artists at the time. He received hundreds of pieces from Salvador Dali, Henry Moore, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and many more. The two pieces that struck me the most were from artists who were unknown to me.


Georg Meistermann's "Pieta" (a stained glass window)

Franco Gentilini's "S. Maria Maggiore" (a painting/drawing)

I wasn't ushered out of my funk but I have some interesting things swirling in my head and I'm looking forward to when they slip out. Whether through a camera, in paint, action, or something else we'll see but I'm considering the idea of "religious art" and how usually it's "bad art" but the Vatican made me re-think that. I'm glad.