Via the Ruah Arts Blog, from a website dedicated to Annie Heyne’s paintings, from her own bio:

So I’m off to the convent, folks! After receiving my Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Dallas, my Masters of Fine Art in oil painting from the New York Academy of Art, I set out for Florence to do post-graduate work at the Florence Academy of Art. It was in Florence that I became familiar with the Religious of the Sacred Heart.

This semi-cloistered order, rooted in St. Madeleine Sophie Barat’s Society of the Sacred Heart, houses a community of 15 nuns, the only community in the only house of this new reform order. As every Roman Catholic religious, these nuns take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their special fourth vow is one of education of the youth.


Annie Heyne at work on a painting.

Many of the rooms of the convent building are used as classrooms. The school is co-ed with kids from 3 to 18 years old. Some of the nuns teach others busy themselves with the boarding students, while others deal with the business aspect of things. Whether it’s with the house, the school, the infirmary, or of course with prayer, you can imagine these nuns keep busy!

The convent stands as a large, white pillar amidst two-hundred olive trees, fruit trees, small vineyards and honey-beehives. While simple on the inside, it is bedecked with every sort of flower and greenery throughout the year on the outside! And of course, there is the view! As the building is just far enough outside the city-center, it lends itself to a breath-taking view of Brunelleschi’s Duomo and really all of Florence. And how amazing it is!

Continue reading via this link. Haven’t made time to really read the bio yet, but my question is “Will she still be able to paint as a semi-cloistered nun?”

R.H. Ives Gammell, author of Twilight of Painting, once referred to anything that didn’t resemble French academic painting as “Misplaced intellectualism imposed on ignorant execution.”

More recently, Gage Academy (a bastion of realism) invited a prominent art dealer to judge a competition. The judge, Greg Kucera, said of the works that “There seems to be a good deal of showing off what one can do but very little that caught any kind of emotional depth. It’s like hearing a violinist who can hit all the notes in a complex sonata by William Walton but not give you any satisfaction of the passion.”

(The students replied on an obnoxiously large piece of paper, “The Passion is in trusting yourself even when the rest of the art world tells you what you are doing isn’t valid. The Passion is in beginning an endeavor like this in the first place. The Passion is in spending 30 hours on a painting struggling to keep it fresh and alive.” All well and good as an artist, but you can’t fault the judge for not seeing trust in yourself or thirty hours on the canvas.)

The above snippets are taken from a long article titled Art School Confidential in The Stranger. One of the Gage Academy students, someone who already has an art degree, said of her university experience in Hong Kong: “It was like, here’s a brush, go paint, you are an artist. After I graduated, I felt like I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t do things.” She dismisses her university art education—”I feel like it’s a lot of BS.” My own art school experience was not quite so stunted, thankfully, although there is precedent for such things.

Both Gammell’s and Kucera’s commentary is valid. Much modern art can be overly-intellectual (or emotional) angst lacking in craft. Likewise, academic painting can be just that, academic — dry and unengaging. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Abstraction or realism? Why does it have to be one or the other? Must we establish such extremes, diggin into our own trench and throwing bombs at the other side? Both abstraction (and non-representational work) and realist works have their place. Both can be, if passionately planned and executed, engaging works, beautiful works, socially challenging works that spur viewers on to better lives.

And perhaps we even need both of these extremes, and everything in-between. People think differently. People respond to different visual stimuli in different ways. Maybe it is a right-brain/left-brain thing.

This isn’t a sappy “Can’t we all just get along” line. However, our inbred bickering (”bickering” to be clearly distinguished from discussion) does neither artist or viewer any good. It would do us well to acknowledge the value in different artistic expressions, even in ones that may not suit our personal taste.

Crystal Bridges has purchased six portraits by Gerardus Duyckinck of a colonial German Jewish family. One of the works:

Arkansas Democrat Gazette story

Benton County Daily Record story

Crystal Bridges museum of American art

Gerardus Duyckinck on Scholar’s Resource