os200327  Rembrandt’s secret gift  What’s under those floor tiles? 

 What’s under those tiles?

 Fooling around early one morning I came across a HOG and, maybe it was because I’m looking for a way to reach back to my former students, it looked different than when I made it. In this hidden object game, I furnished a picture of the restored studio in the Rembrandt museum.

I’d looked at this picture dozens of times, but today it looked different because of the floor. It’s a tiled floor which was tiled with blue-glazed ceramics. The glaze was worn off in places, revealing red, low-fire clay the tiles were made of.

http://www.printmakingworld.com/emeralda/pp/ppprod/pp_games/RembrandtsHOG/RH_index.html

In the years since I made this image and set hotspots where the hidden objects were, the tiles – not the objects printmakers used that are listed at the bottom of the image - mean more because I wrote a novel years after I made the HOG.

The novel, “Rembrandt’s ghost in the new machine,” I self-published it in 2013 using amazon’s Kindle system. In my novel, those tiles figured in the plotline because Rembrandt put his thoughts on paper, but since his thoughts were risky, he hid them under the tiles.

The floor was full of Rembrandt’s secrets! His dread was that someone would find his notes and he’d be crucified for them. In my story, retrieving the secrets became a driving motive, and my protagonist, Mac, is drafted to help get them out of the room that had been his studio.

Much in my novel has historic bases – how he lost his house and studio in bankruptcy (including his press), the people he associated with, his family and what he was likely doing in 1660 when my time-traveler encountered him. No one knows if Rembrandt wrote anything.

This month I started a rewrite on the advice of an editor I hired a few years ago – John Belmont. In this rewrite a “Rembrandt’s secrets” theme beats the ghost theme. Now, secrets are more interesting.

On this day, the gift of Rembrandt is overtaking his “secrets.” The gift, to me, is what we infer from Rembrandt’s life. He was not on a quest of the kind which colors heroes’ lives. Most likely, he likely just wanted to make art, and he had a gift for it. We might say that by making his paintings and prints he created gifts, but gift-giving was not on his intent.

It was not meant as an offering. It was his business. I don’t think Stephen Spielberg was thinking of making a gift to society when he went to work – he had a passion for storytelling through film and making a living at it. Like Rembrandt, I bet.

Today, we’re at crossroads because the coronavirus pandemic is upon us. No one is sure that life on Earth for humans will look like weeks or years from today. As for me, I’m glad I made the HOG, glad I wrote the novel, glad I met – through my experience writing and promoting it – people like Ernest Horvers and Peter van Honk.

These Dutch men taught me things like Rembrandt taught me. Not as gifts - not that teaching me was their intent. In my mind meeting with them gave me ideas and took on lives of their own in my imagination. I kept thinking up new ideas about printmaking and how printmaking might be useful for teaching people – young and old.

STEM-based education, for example, for kids. By adding Art to the mix (STEAM), maybe printmaking is more important to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math than art teachers realized.

This is not new. Decades ago, when I was a professor at the UW, there were attempts to cross-fertilize art and science. The pressures of the art world always transcended those rare efforts. An artist who took up computer graphics, for example, would likely to end up working for a game company and become a famous artist. A gallery that showing art heavy with technology was unlikely to thrive on this genre.

Today, as I reviewed my old HOG, and glad to see it again, I looked at the floor in the image and imagined what we’d find if my story were true – that those tiles had, the originals in their day, covered Rembrandt’s secrets, his gifts.

This image itself is a gift to me. How can I share it? One way is to back to that image and make a hotspot on each tile. Click on the hotspot, would a secret pop up? A scientist, for example, what would he or she make of that? Imagining this, is Rembrandt’s secret gift.