June 24, 2022

Weekly Cucumber Salad #6 🥒

a) A week in The Netherlands: trip updates

As I have mentioned last week, this newsletter will be a short one with travel updates. I also didn’t have time to have it edited and reviewed, so the writing is going to be a bit less sophisticated and correct than the usual.

Amsterdam

After a 16 hour long trip, I got to spend two amazing days with my friend Clara and her boyfriend in Amsterdam. Since Clara is an artist (currently focused in painting), we decided it would be enjoyable to spend our my brief visit exploring some museums.

Rijksmuseum

Amazingly famous paintings, specially by Rembrandt. I had no idea The Night Watch was such a large painting and that Vermeer’s The Milkmaid was so tiny.

Powerful artworks that literally look like windows into the past, with characters that seem to be staring at you directly from the 1600s. An overall incredible experience.

Stedelijk Museum

A modernist’s wet dream. We did a very brief visit to the Stedelijk, but it was long enough to feel the excitement and freshness of modernist optimism.

Even now, the energy that guided modernists is still contagious and moving. Made me feel happy about being a graphic designer, about having learned from what once were the teachings from Kandinsky and Lazló Moholy-Nagy.

Modernism is so powerful because it was so incredibly imaginative and disruptive, it was developed under a powerful revolutionary desire and I felt really connected to it while I was at the museum (also just generally hyped about communists making art, lol).

Van Gogh Museum

I was not really looking forward to this visit because I’ve always felt like Van Gogh’s work was overrated and overstated, because of how commodified it has been. It’s a bit tiring to see all kinds of products printed with his work, and honestly, this over-commercialisation diminishes its impact and force.

It is an understatement to say I was COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY by the artworks at this museum. I really didn’t expect Van Gogh’s work to be so deeply powerful and moving.

Part of the reason why I was so impressed is the fact that I finally understood the complexity and innovation behind his colour work. The use of colour is extremely thoughtful, skilful, and inspiring. I took pictures of dozens of paintings for colour palette references.

Evangelion's Unit 01 color palette was first summoned in 1890 when Van Gogh painted "Trees and Undergrowth" DO NOT @ ME!

Another factor that really moved me and made the experience so intense, was to comprehend why Van Gogh’s work is characterised by an excessive amount brushstrokes with thick amounts of paint. I understood like ultimately he was trying to capture all the intensity of life and energy he was getting from the things he was painting.

I felt like it was an honour that someone with such a rich and powerful vision of life decided to share his perspective through his art.

Immediately after I left the building I was looking at the flowers and trees with a different perception of colour blending and textures. I felt more inspired to explore colour interactions and palettes found in nature.

The temporary exhibition “Color as Language” was exploring the works of Etel Adnan and was also very inspiring and refreshing.

Visiting this museum was a very intense experience, and I actually left feeling very melancholic about the fact that Van Gogh never have the chance to learn about the internationally recognised unmatched power of his work.

Thoughts

Amsterdam is a city where the life quality is shockingly high. I got to see some kids leaving school and picking their bikes to go home one afternoon while Clara was showing me around, and we bonded over a feeling of resentment that drove me to tears.

I just don’t understand what being raised in such an amazingly safe and reliable environment can do to someone’s head. I felt disrespected about all the time of my life wasted on traffic jams, waiting for buses…

What if I could have redirected all of the energy I wasted being paranoid about living in a violent city into something creative and meaningful? What If all those hours commuting could have been dedicated to something important in my life?

Ultimately I felt anger, for people in the Global South are the ones who have to pay the price for the few to be born and raised Dutch in cities like Amsterdam. And those people are the ones who get to have their basic dignities respected and grow with room to fulfill their potentials and follow their dreams, and they do that with a clear consciousness.

The amount of distraction and stress redirected from potentially meaningful work because of non-reliable government infrastructure is IMMENSE, and honestly, I believe this is part of the reason why we’re still stuck so deep in the mud in places like South America.

We don’t have time to be creative, we don’t have time to enjoy life, we don’t have time go get in touch with culture, and we don’t have time to politically organise because our houses are flooding, our kids are constantly in danger, our basic human rights are being constantly threatened.

There’s no other word other than deep resentment to describe the anger I felt during some moments of this trip. Specially because growing up in Brazil I got to hear a lot about how many of the country’s problems were caused because Brazilians were “inherently corrupt” and all those kinds of crazy excuses people try to find when they don’t understand the deep and lasting effects of colonialism and imperialism.

Of course I still had lots of fun and enjoyed myself while in Amsterdam. I’m not a completely bitter orb of anger (yet).

With love 🐝,
Ana Luisa