Reading: Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith (only $4.99 on Kindle) by Russ Ramsey. A pastor takes a deep dive into several famous artists, often flawed and tortured souls searching for beauty and meaning through their immense creative gifts. A treasure trove of art history, but also deeply reflective of our own longing for God, the giver of Beauty, without which Truth and Goodness can end up being stilted and dry.
Watching: Tim’s Vermeer. I learned about this documentary from Pastor Ramsey’s book. A wealthy, successful inventor who loves art goes on a search for how in the world Vermeer managed to create such luminous, perfect scenes, without apparently using the methods of his day, such as creating preliminary sketches and tracing in what he intended to paint. Directed by the silent partner Teller and produced by Penn Jillette, Tim Jenison laboriously recreated the scene of a Vermeer painting (The Music Lesson), in order to test his hypothesis of how Vermeer may have used special optical devices to render his scenes in such life-like detail. Tim, with no painting experience, painted a copy of Vermeer’s work in five months, after taking years of research and recreating the scene as the artist might have seen it.
Eating: I finished Dr. Mark Hyman’s 10-day detox a couple of days ago…no dairy, grains, legumes, sugar or most artificial sweeteners (I did put monk fruit in my coffee), and no alcohol. He suggests no caffeine, as well, but I cut back to a morning cup of coffee and green tea in the afternoon. I felt much better afterward, and I’m pretty certain dairy is not my friend, which is a problem as pizza is one of my favorite things.