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The best free cultural & educational media on the web | Open Culture -- -- -- The best free cultural & educational media on the web | -- -- The best free cultural & educational media on the web -- -- Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks -- K-12 th Grade K-12 -- eBooks Donate -- -- David Hockney on Vincent van Gogh & the Importance of Knowing How to Truly See the World in Art | April 23rd, 2020 Facebook Twitter Reddit Subscribe Google Whatsapp Pinterest Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Vk Print Delicious Buffer Pocket Xing Tumblr Mail Yummly Telegram Flipboard Advertisement For a few months, David Hockney was the most expensive artist in the world, after his masterwork Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90 million in November 2018. (He was outsold last May by Jeff Koons, who set the previous record in 2013.) The sale says all kinds of things about the state of the art market, but Hockney has always been driven by a need to make things, not to profit, a compulsion as relentless as that of one of his heroes, Vincent van Gogh. A Portrait of an Artist ’s creation, told in the 1974 film A Bigger Splash , is the story of a labor of love. Hockney painted and repainted and repainted, giving up once then starting over again, working with a very van Gogh-like intensity. Otherwise the influence may not be obvious from his most famous, and most expensive, canvas. After his “L.A. swimming pool period,” however, Hockney moved on to other subjects and other media. In the late 90s, he returned to the Yorkshire of his boyhood when his mother became ill. He took up plein air landscapes painting in oils and watercolors. Hockney describes this transition in a March 2019 interview above from the Van Gogh Museum. In part, he says, he wanted to answer a challenge. “I knew landscape was seen as something you couldn’t do today,” he says. “And I thought, ‘why?’ Because the landscape’s become so boring? It’s not the landscape that’s become boring, it’s the depictions of it that have become boring. You can’t be bored of nature, can you?” You also cannot become bored of van Gogh. He knew, Hockney says, how to “really look. He saw very clearly. I mean, very, very clearly.” Van Gogh expressed the clarity of his vision in lucid, lyrical prose. Hockney begins the short interview above with a quote from a December 1882 van Gogh letter: “Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.” The passage gets a knowing nod from Hockney, who has had much more to say on this theme lately. Both van Gogh and Hockney describe their experiences with landscape painting as a kind of intensive art therapy. Hockney, now sequestered in Normandy while France is in lockdown, has suggested that others should do the same during this time , as a way of relieving stress and appreciating their place in nature. People should put away their cameras (and, by definition, their phones). “I would suggest people could draw at this time,” he says, “Question everything and do not think about photography. I would suggest they really look hard at something and think about what they are really seeing.” Hockney has come away from his time painting nature with some particularly intriguing insights. “In a way,” he says above, “nature doesn’t really have perspective. I’ve noticed trees don’t follow the rules of perspective…. Perspective is a strangling, I think. It’s not really making space, it’s strangling space.” It’s an observation we can apply to rigid ways of seeing at reality, none of which seem to make much sense anymore. We won't all be as visionary or as driven as van Gogh or David Hockney, but time spent learning to “really look” might be time well spent indeed. Related Content: Watch as David Hockney Creates ‘Late November Tunnel, 2006’ Download David Hockney’s Playful Drawings for the iPhone and iPad Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now Digitized and Put Online: View/Download the Collection Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | -- Facebook Twitter Reddit Subscribe Google Whatsapp Pinterest Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Vk Print Delicious Buffer Pocket Xing Tumblr Mail Yummly Telegram Flipboard -- Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards in Education , Physics , Science | April 23rd, 2020 Facebook Twitter Reddit Subscribe Google Whatsapp Pinterest Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Vk Print Delicious Buffer Pocket Xing Tumblr Mail Yummly Telegram Flipboard Advertisement Albert Einstein was a precocious child. At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus. But while the young Einstein was engrossed in intellectual pursuits, he didn't much care for school. He hated rote learning and despised authoritarian schoolmasters. His sense of intellectual superiority was resented by his teachers. In Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein , author Abraham Pais tells a funny story from Einstein's days at the Luitpold Gymnasium, a secondary school in Munich now called the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium: At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, "Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect that a teacher needs from his class." The same teacher famously said that Einstein "would never get anywhere in life." What bothered Einstein most about the Luitpold was its oppressive atmosphere. His sister Maja would later write: "The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was also particularly unpleasant for the boy. He contemplated with dread that not-too-distant moment when he will have to don a soldier's uniform in order to fulfill his military obligations." When he was sixteen, Einstein's parents moved to Italy to pursue a business venture. They told him to stay behind and finish school. But Einstein was desperate to join them in Italy before his seventeenth birthday. "According to the German citizenship laws," Maja explained, "a male citizen must not emigrate after his completed sixteenth year; otherwise, if he fails to report for military service, he is declared a deserter." So Einstein found a way to get a doctor's permission to withdraw from the school on the pretext of "mental exhaustion," and fled to Italy without a diploma. Years later, in 1944, during the final days of World War II, the Luitpold Gymnasium was obliterated by Allied bombing. So we don't have a record of Einstein's grades there. But there is record of a principal at the school looking up Einstein's grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Einstein had been a very bad student. Walter Sullivan writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times : With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein's marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math. After he dropped out, Einstein's family enlisted a well-connected friend to persuade the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only sixteen years old and had not graduated from high school. He scored brilliantly in physics and math, but poorly in other areas. The director of the ETH suggested he finish preparatory school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A diploma from the cantonal school woul...