Duke had a poster sale going on shortly after I arrived in '96, so I checked it out. To my surprise, I found one I liked enough to buy: a print of a painting I'd never seen before called Hylas and the Nymphs by a guy named JW Waterhouse. Naturally, I liked all the lovely chyx, but what really grabbed me was the perfect balance between dimensionality and openness: enough shading to provide the illusion of depth, but not so much that the painting looks like a tableau of plastic action figures. So I cropped, laminated and hung my poster, looked up Waterhouse on the web, found that he'd done a lot of similarly cool stuff, and then didn't think about him much at all for a couple of years.

Then I went to Ken Lee's home studio in Panorama City to record my band's single. Ken's roommate had a couple of prints up, including one I hadn't seen before, a piece called Circe Invidiosa. The dynamic vertical composition and the awesomely deep blues and greens caught my eye and as I was staring at it I suddenly realized, hey, another Waterhouse. The roommate in question noticed my fixation on the painting and showed off a couple of books he had on Pre-Raphaelite painting, including one about the models that's now out of print (too bad, because it looked really interesting.) I decided I needed to know more, so I got a book on Waterhouse by Anthony Hobson. It wasn't great. The text had little to recommend it, but much more damningly, most of the pictures were in black and white! Eeeagh! Talk about totally missing the point. My investigations stopped there.

Then a couple years after that I had a book signing at the UW bookstore and happened upon a tome with a distinctively Waterhouse lass on the front. I say "tome" because this was a hefty book, about the size of two deluxe notebook computers stacked on top of one another, and appeared to be a survey of the entirety of nineteenth-century British painting. I flipped through it and was impressed: the illustrations were of a much higher quality than in the Hobson book, and I especially liked the way the book was organized, so I made a note to pick it up once I could afford the hefty pricetag. A gift certificate took care of that, so soon I had my very own copy of Victorian Painting by Lionel Lambourne.

I should note at this point that I am pretty much an ignoramus when it comes to art, and this was the first piece of art history I'd ever read. So what follows is the opinion of a complete neophyte. For instance, the organization I mentioned may well be standard practice, for all I know. But for the record, the book is broken down not chronologically, but by theme: there are chapters on the Victorian art establishment, murals, portraits, landscapes, historical paintings, panoramas, paintings of kids, paintings of fairies, paintings of animals and sports, the Pre-Raphaelites, society paintings, the nude, female artists, social realism, emigration and war, paintings of women, American painting, colonial painting, romanticism, and impressionism, plus intro and outro chapters. (Whew! As noted, a big book.) Unfortunately, no matter how appealingly you slice it, the writing is pretty dull. "Then there was this guy (18__-18__) and he painted like this (Pl. __), and then there was this other guy (18__-18__) and he painted this one (Pl. __), and oh, there was another guy (18__-19__) who's famous for this one over here (Pl. __)." Only written a bit more stuffily. I'm trying to come up with something to say about the writing — I even wrote down bits to mention in my eventual writeup, but now that I look at them they aren't worth the time to transcribe. I guess if I had to sum up the writing in a word it would be "forgettable." Oh, and the guy whose work is regarded as such a highlight of the period that he gets the cover? He gets all of a paragraph in the interior. Grrr.

So much for the actual book. Here's what I learned from it.

Visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York a while back, I noted that, at least to my eyes, which artists become famous is not just luck of the draw: standing in a room surrounded by twenty works, all of them fairly similar and all of them also totally unknown to me, I was drawn to the two that turned out to be by Picasso and not to any of the ones by people with names like Mortimer J. Random. This pattern held true for the Victorian painting book. It features reproductions of well over 600 paintings, some by people so famous that even I'd heard of them (Sargent, Whistler) and some such as Phoebus Levin's "The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (Pl. 328) [in which] a group of prostitutes and their clients play with a performing monkey mounted on a poodle led by a dwarf". Which did I like best? The Sargent and the Whistler. (Especially the Whistler — more on that below.) Just as in the museum, I'd see a new painting, think "Hey, now there's a good one!" and then check the caption to find, oh, it's by a famous guy. One exception was an extraordinary painting of the ruins of a chapel in Edinburgh, which is not just photorealistic but more realistic than a photo. Was it by a famous painter? Nope. It was by, of all people, Louis Daguerre. It was like admiring a beautiful piece of calligraphy and then discovering it was by Johannes Gutenberg.

Lesson two was a dictum that's been applied to any number of other media: the value of a work lies not in what it is about but in how it is about it. An album might have a dozen songs on it, but though the lyrics and notes will be different, and some might be better and some might be worse, it's the band's sound that really matters: do you like the grain of the singer's voice, the texture of the guitars, the chord sequences they tend to go for? It's the same with painting. I may prefer Waterhouse's 1894 take on The Lady of Shallott to the 1888 one, but the important thing is, I like the way Waterhouse paints people. By the same token, I don't like the way Holman Hunt draws people, so much as I like Hylas and the Nymphs, I strongly doubt I'd care for a Hunt version of the painting. But a Waterhouse version of Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd (in the same museum as Nymphs, as it happens)? Bring it on. Burne-Jones, Poynter, Alma-Tadema... they all give Good Human. I shall seek out more of their work.

Finally, let me get oblique for a second and present a quote of Jim Leff's that I happened across over at chowhound.com: "The art of cooking is no different from any other: a feeling or idea in the mind of the artist (cook) faithfully transfers via a medium (food) into the mind of the audience (eater), the MESSAGE TRANSCENDING THE MEDIUM. [...] The Arepa Lady is telling you something deep, and what she's telling you has nothing to do with corn cakes." For most people, good food is just a source of pleasure; to Jim Leff, however, flavor is a language, one that expresses things that spoken languages can't.

This is how I feel about color. I've never given much thought to colorblindness, but just recently I've had a couple of encounters with the phenomenon. First, someone asked me to make more dramatic distinctions among the colors on my albums page because he was colorblind and couldn't tell the difference between the two middle ones. Then a few weeks later I was reading a column over at The Man Who Viewed Too Much where Mike D'Angelo described himself as "pretty severely colorblind," which shocked me a little — sort of like a restaurant critic admitting he lost most of his tongue in Nam or some such. Me, I'm the opposite of color-blind: I have mild synesthesia and translate everything into color, especially letters and numbers. Color is the deepest language I know. It drives me nuts that gamma levels aren't consistent from screen to screen, because it mucks up the ability to send color information over the net: to me it's exactly as if I were a chef making you a meal and couldn't be assured that my basil wouldn't be replaced with parsley on the way to your table, or if I were a composer scoring music for violin and you heard it played on the cello.

So one observation I had early on in thinking about painting is that, yes, a painter may be representing a person or a landscape, but on a deeper level, what he or she is doing is arranging colors over a space, and in that way communicating a more profound message than "this is what I imagine Baron von Snappypantz's expression looked like at the Battle of Evermore" or whatnot. And who understood this better than anyone in the Victorian period, with titles like "Nocturne in Blue and Silver: the Lagoon, Venice" and "Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket" and "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: the Artist's Mother"? Whistler. There's a painting in this book called "Symphony in White No. 1: the White Girl" that's just stunningly beautiful. It's a young woman wearing a simple white dress standing against a backdrop the color of dirty ivory. And Whistler does indeed give Very Good Human, and the girl is lovely and the dress is lovely, but what this painting captures is the idea of White, in a way that no words could ever articulate (and in a way that a blank white canvas could never articulate either, for all you wags out there.) Incredibly moving.

So, ironically, the main value I got out of this book was not the way it presented Victorian painting, but simply the contents themselves — any book might have done. Hard to tell with only one data point. Perhaps I should pick up the Christopher Wood book of the same title. Anyone care to send me another gift certificate?

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