In which we head to the café
The Café proved to be an excellent format. It left Steeve and I much more freedom to talk about what was happening in and around the world of art, and to place artists in a social context. Steeve was happy to talk about ballet steps, and the invention of submarines, while I spoke of Velázquez, van Dyck, and Gentileschi.
In 2012 we focused on Paris and Florence.
It was early in 2012 that I gave a first series of art classes. For some reason – I can’t imagine why! – I called it ‘Art History’, about as dry and uninspired a title as you could find…
I think at first that I could not see a great demand for such an academic discourse and therefore did not pay much attention to marketing it.
To my surprise, the classes were filled from the very first! Greek art, then Roman, then skipping a thousand years to medieval and renaissance times, and onwards, up to modern art. I changed the title to something more endearing:
I repeated this series several times, both in Georgina and further afield – Markham, Pickering, Aurora…
I soon realized that I needed to develop many more presentations, such was the demand for these two-hour dives into art history. I started to create presentations that looked at the messages and meanings in paintings, sometimes hidden, sometimes in plain view but where we have forgotten what symbols or colours mean. I called this series Secrets behind paintings, and have put together almost 30 of these topics.
Incidentally, Steeve’s contribution to the PowerPoint slides included a ‘break’ slide, always tailored to the topic of the presentation:
We often pressed the whole family into volunteer musical performance, and in Café Florence Gabriel gave a lovely rendering on the piano of a short Italian piece, with Steeve adding some accompaniment:
We have a friend whose son was taking classical ballet lessons, and when Steeve mentioned that the techniques of ballet were codified in Paris in the 1760s by the dance instructor of King Louis 14 (the Sun King) I asked our friend’s son if he would be willing to give a live demonstration. His performance was one of the highlights of 2012!
