introduction

*Note: I realize now how much of this is similar to my last post, but I feel like I explain it in a different way and focus more on that first semester a bit, so I will leave it be and start with the real Art History stuff in the next entry. Still sorting myself out, you know.*

This is both an introduction to myself and an introduction to Art History. I don't really know how to do it any other way as most of my Art History experience has been very me-centric. I guess I first became somewhat interested in art by virtue of being interested in architecture because my dad is an architect and my mom is a realtor.

My parents, especially my dad, always took us to museums as kids, and we had a good rule of not having to do anything other than walk around at the pace we wanted and look at whatever interested us. This way, we didn't feel conned into going to the museum and willingly went along and left whenever we felt ready. Parents: I advise this to you so that museums are a friendly environment for your kids. Although I didn't know or care much about art until I took Art History, I always enjoyed the feeling of museums. They are so clean and elegant, and the ones in my hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, are particularly nice - the Kimbell, in particular, is one of my favorites. In my mind, they were nice places to go on Sundays or vacations, look at some interesting stuff, feel grown up and fancy, and then look at weird stuff in the museum gift shop.

I set off to Williams College with every intention of studying math. I had taken calculus and multivariable calculus in high school and loved them. When I met with my advisor at Williams, he briefly made me work out some multivariable problems and pronounced me ready to move on. My first math class in college was a Linear Algebra tutorial with four other [male upperclassmen] students. It was definitely harder and different than the other math I had studied, but I enjoyed it. Freshman spring, I took something or other vector calculus, which I think was not the best advice from my advisor as it ruled out statistics from my major track, and sophomore fall, I took my Abstract Algebra course - Groups & Characters. I understood the lectures in class and the proofs during office hours, but on my own, in ym door room, my friends would find me in a mess of books and notes on the floor, ready to cry because I couldn't for the life of me think of the theorems to use or how. It was just too abstract for my visual, tangible-loving mind.

Meanwhile, sophomore fall I had signed up for Introduction to Western Art, a year long course divided into a fall semester on sculpture and architecture and a spring semester on painting. I had been coerced by my fellow students freshman year into taking art history at Williams because they have the best professors in the country. Completely uninterested and intimidated by the infamous slide quizzes, I resisted for a while but eventually signed up.

And then classes started. I don't know if I was enraptured on day one, but I must have been. The sculpture and architecture professor was E. J. Johnson. I had to look up his profile (or perhaps there is a better, non-facebook inspired term out there) on the website to make sure that I gave him appropriate credit. I admired and loved almost every professor I had at Williams, and certainly respected them all, but Professor Johnson changed the world for me. I wish I knew how long he had been teaching at Williams, but it must be years because he seems like such a fixture of the department and the introductory classes. At any rate, I was lucky enough to have him both for the full class lecture three times a week and the weekly conference of about 20 students.

Professor Johnson is an older man, and he is always accompanied by his dog, Soane (I hope I spelled that right), a brown and white spotted dog who sits quietly at his feet by the podium during classes. Occasionally, Soane would gaze up adoringly at his/her master, but usually the dog was content to just sit on the stage and be a part of the experience. Now, I know that many of my classmates found those lectures very soporific. Intro ArtH is one of the larger classes at Williams and takes place in a darkened auditorium. Professor Johnson has a soft, sonorous voice that reveals the details of paintings with admirable eloquence. I cannot overstate what it is to listen to him lecture. He would walk in with his dog and a stack of notecards of the slides for the day, begin talking as the lights dimmed, and ask the student operating the slide projector for "the next, please." For those of us able to resist falling asleep, and I am sure that I had sleepy days and one or two that I missed, he then transformed a building or sculpture into a symbol of its time that communicated ideas and more information than I could have anticipated. Within his even cadence and intellectual information, he was even clever and funny, and I remember registering jokes and quips moments after they had passed from his lips because he so discretely slipped them in.

I had struggled with history in high school. Not struggling in the sense of grades because I studied well enough to score well on essays and tests, but struggled to really understand anything or have it stick in my brain. To this day, I don't think I know much of anything about the world that I didn't learn in Art History, in spite of having had good history teachers. The problem was that I am a visual learner, and no matter how many notes I took and studied, I just couldn't see what we were talking about. But then I had Professor Johnson explaining how the Greek temples were built to facilitate important rituals and had even incorporated those rituals into the facades, or that the Christians didn't want their art to look like that of the pagan Greeks, so they developed a new canon of images to portray their god. Dates stuck in my head because I could see how one style preceded another and related to certain religious beliefs, political personas, financial opportunities, and other outside influences. Really and truly, art history enabled me to understand the world around me. I was overwhelmed with my new access to knowledge and understanding.

By the end of the first semester, I decided to drop math and give art history a try as my major. The major requirements seemed very reasonable and flexible, I was doing well in my classes, and I was curious to learn more about the world. I figured that I didn't have a career path set out for myself anyway, that theoretical mathematics wouldn't be part of it anyway - only practical, applied math and I had already taken all of that, and that art history would at least teach me about the world and how to analyze and write. Plus, a liberal arts degree is a liberal arts degree, why not take what I wanted to? So I did. Then I graduated college and moved to Casablanca, Morocco to be a math teaching intern. I got antsy and missed art history, so I started teaching guest classes for the art and history students. When I came to Sofia, Bulgaria to teach English at a high school with an American curriculum, I decided to offer an introductory class as an elective. I don't really know how art history will be involved in my life in the future, and I, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, don't want to pursue a masters or doctorate degree in the field, but I do think about it often. And I always go to museums when I travel, and my brain gets revved up a bit again and tries to reach into my memory files to my classes at Williams.

So all I have to offer is what I know from my notes left from my classes at Williams and my experiences teaching art and visiting museums. I don't have much in-depth knowledge about anything in particular, aside from some semester-long research projects. But what I do have is the perspective of someone who was not an Art Historian but felt like it was a discipline that helped open up my eyes to the world around me. I love how it has helped make the world and history a little more tangible for me. So, I want to try and organize my notes and lectures into coherent thoughts, partly as a record for myself and partly in case anyone is interested in reading them. I hope that I will learn how to present it such that anyone who is curious can easily read through my (rather long, though I will try to control myself) entries and learn a little bit more about an artist or a movement or a period. It's a learning process, and we will see how I do.