By any measure in the art world, when the east coast Canadian artist, Miller Brittain, had a solo exhibition at New York City’s prestigious Hartert Galleries in February 1953, it was an outstanding accomplishment for a Canadian painter.

In fact, by then, Brittain had had several critically successful shows in New York. He was viewed as one of Canada’s outstanding artists whose expressive paintings and drawings were regarded as attempts at coming to terms with his wartime experiences as an air force bomb aimer. They were also seen as reflecting the spirit of the times as the nation sought to make sense of almost six years of catastrophic war, and to establish a unique identity distinct from that of the United States and Great Britain.

Before the war his subject matter centred on the people of his hometown and their living conditions, which he rendered in a realistic style that was meant to highlight the poverty he saw around him and how it affected both physical and spiritual health.

After the war he turned his attention to treating what he called “the problem of good and evil” by shifting his emphasis to rendering inner conflict and strong emotions that he felt were, “the inevitable experience of everyman.” By representing these interior forces and his own personal demons, Brittain hoped to wipe them from his mind by rendering them visible as art.

To a large degree he was successful as he delved ever deeper into the territory he called, “love, despair, terror, and so on.” But there was a personal cost in mining such psychological depths. Returning to the surface and finding a healthy emotional balance was difficult. He likely suffered from what we refer to today as post-traumatic stress.

As a religious person, Brittain gradually shifted his artistic aims to reflect upon and represent in his art the epic struggle between God and Satan for dominion over creation and the soul of humanity. He sought redemption in religion, but found it in artistic creation.

The intensity and power of Brittain’s art and the relevance of his message struck a chord with viewers across Canada and the United States. In the fall of 1950 twenty of Brittain’s paintings exploring his inner plight were presented at New York’s George Binet Gallery, Brittain’s first major solo commercial exhibition.

The reviews were unanimous in their praise. one critic affirmed that Brittain was “one of Canada’s most original talents.”The influential Art Digest referred to Brittain as “an artist of vision and sensitivity….[who] achieves a harmony of colour impressions and strong personal expressions…[with] paintings vital in spiritual content and often atmospheric in quality.”

Brittain was also considered an abstract painter whose images grew “from an inner conviction that manifested itself first in non-objective daubing with shapes and colours and then allowing the forms to emerge as they will.”

The astute Curator of Art at the New Brunswick Museum, Avery Shaw, wrote that Brittain’s art offered a “corrective” to the pervasive influence of the Group of Seven in Canadian painting. An American curator, echoing Shaw’s observation, characterized Brittain’s paintings as indicative of “Canadian art…becoming free of the provincial tradition of the 1930s.”

In the early 1950s, just as it appeared Brittain’s forms would be wholly absorbed into images conjuring up apocalyptic landscapes, he once again he altered his style. He began painting and drawing disturbing and enigmatic pastels containing stick-like figures and strange flowers all set in chillingly empty wastelands. A reviewer of the 1953 New York exhibition described these works as having, “A romantic agony.”

Brittain’s artistic reputation is grounded in his honest creative courage. He confronted evil both as a soldier and artist, and translated the encounters in art that is as intensely powerful today as it was when it reached a highpoint of international recognition more than seven decades ago.

[Miller Brittain, And Then God Made Two Great Lights, 1950; Detail from Tuberculosis Hospital Mural, 1941-42; Woman’s Head, 1960.]

Artist, author and cultural commentator, Guelph, Ontario-based Seth is one of the foremost graphic novelists working in the world today. His unparalleled technical mastery as a draughtsman, combined with his unique talents for evoking an entire imaginative world based on mid-twentieth century small-town life, rank him as a gifted graphic novelist and storyteller, part of a distinguished line of Canadian designers, and one of my favourite artists.

“Seth” is the artistic doppelganger of the man named Gregory Gallant who was born in Clinton, Ontario, in 1962. A small town situated in the fertile hills of the Huron Track on the windward side of Lake Huron, Clinton’s roots are embedded in a farming and forestry economy that has now passed. Gallant entered the world just as prosperity was leaving Clinton. During the Second World War, its army base kept the local economy going, but the town fell on hard times in the late 1950s, particularly after the murder of a young Lynne Harper led to the wrongful conviction of Stephen Truscott and the painting of the town as a notorious outpost of criminality.

Seth can also be described as a sophisticated performance artist. He cloaks his artistic practice in the garments of a cartoonist and illustrator intent on examining the flexibility of the comic book format to probe the many ways that loss and longing can cloud one’s memories of the past.

In life Seth has immersed himself in the fashion, trappings, design motifs and manners of a mid-twentieth century man. Just as the world he manufactures around himself in his home echoes a time long past, so the world he describes in his art resonates with the same voice. There is a fundamental integrity to the world he draws. Every detail is set down with the intention of crafting an artistic reality that is true to what he sees as a simpler time in a Canada that existed a generation before he was born.

This is the conceptual stage on which Seth, the artist, performs. His drawings are made with the purpose of being printed commercially in a number of formats—as single panel comics, as multi-page comic books, book and magazine covers, and as commercial illustrations and graphic illustrations for storybooks and novels.

Beyond his signature style of clear outlines, easily identifiable figure types, and evocative graphic landscapes and scenes, Seth places great stock in the immersive possibilities of drawn and printed imagery to take an attentive reader back in time. He wants to draw us so completely into his art that a magical transformation is possible.

The trip, though, is not entirely the readers’. It is Seth’s as well. In many respects, Seth’s art and the life have many touch points, to the extent that it is tempting to note that one reflects the other. This close interaction between the lived and the drawn could be said to comprise an original form of autobiography.

A close look at Seth’s self-revealing performance art is made possible by studying his comic book series Palookaville, first published twenty-five years ago. Reading this serial book illuminates Seth’s richly layered creative process and output. In its imaginative range, in the scope of its themes, and even in the wonderfully diverse ways the artist uses, manipulates and develops the cartoon and comic book formats, Palookaville is a remarkable testament that probes the existential questions.

Palookaville is influenced by many earlier cartoon styles seen in comic books and magazines, particularly New Yorker. Seth uses them to tell complicated narratives about life. If this new-age comic book has an overarching cadence it is defined by the way Seth circles around compelling theories on the nature of life, on the elasticity of time, on the nature of memory, and on one’s relationship to the past crafted in personal terms as a connection among family members.

Palookaville also presents highly entertaining stories, among them the heartbreaking Clyde Fans, lamenting how times change due to economic vagaries beyond the control of any one person. In the manner that Seth tells and draws his stories through his memorable characters, he sheds light on their pathos, especially on the hubris that made them step away from the forces of change and growth. In the interactions he describes among brothers and other family members he casts a light on the sometimes-tortuous habits and behaviours that can and do disrupt lives. Above all, he masterfully takes his readers into the minds and psyches of his characters in fantastic ways; his portraits of depression, psychosis and perhaps even madness are gripping, real descriptions of disturbing mental health conditions. In short, Palookaville is an audaciously original serialized work of art and worth a close look.

Alex Colville knew one big thing that he exposed in every single drawing and painting that he set down on paper, canvas or board.

His art exerts a strong magnetic pull on me, compelling me again and again to confront its perplexing nature. Every time I return to it, I inevitably find myself staring at the same mysterious presence. Although he made thousand and thousands of drawings, and hundreds of different paintings, every single one affects me in the very same way.

One big theme, one elusive subject, the singular secret that he took with him when he died was what constitutes that one unifying myth of his art. The clues lie in the pictures themselves and, for me, especially in the drawings that are their preliminary studies.

In the way he turns lines so finely, or plops a mark down in an awkward gesture, Colville’s drawings lead the eye along a purely abstract path.

I don’t entirely understand the algorithms, logarithms, golden sections and square roots that crisscross his drawings, serving as invisible foundational armatures for his imagery. While he tried to tell me about the differences between the many mystical numbering series, I zoned out in front of what are surely some of the finest abstract drawings ever made in Canadian art. In the coded proportions that underpin his compositions, there are unfathomable truths that I suspect reveal something of what he was wanting to get at in the paintings that ultimately grew—were incarnated—from the drawn mathematics.

There is cleanliness in the simple and complex geometries that he traced in pen on drawing after drawing. They comprise elegant dances that tease out a picture from the nothingness of paper, board and canvas. A circle, bisected by a rectangle, and then a spiral looping out from an intersection point: a drawing of this kind gives way to another that varies the angles slightly to stretch the spiral. Another drawing and then another chart thought directly as his mind comes to grips with harmonies as pure as anything that came from the hands of Glenn Gould.

The unchanging laws of numerological ratios for Colville comprise the fundamental bedrock of a reality that was not pictorial at all.

This much is true about the man and about the principles on which he made art: One part is wholly abstract, based on a process of its own becoming, governed by nothing more than the mind roaming unhindered, simply to find ratios and proportions that are aesthetically pleasing.

The other part lies in plumbing the less orderly realm of memory. Call it automatism or free association, this quizzical, intense inquiry was his way of uncovering truth and reality as accurately as if he were analyzing a pentagon. He valued the imagination, pure and simple, as a trusted vat of images.

As beautifully elegant as the geometry is, when Colville began to develop recognizable imagery a seemingly incongruous clumsiness fell on his drawing paper. It would be untrue to say he had difficulty drawing naturalistically. In the vastly different styles of drawing evident when the two styles collide on the same page, something keen starts to radiate outward.

One reality abuts the other. The rude form of drawn lines renders something realistically. The result is that the pleasingly graceful scrim-like abstract lines appear to catch in their web the awkward tracings of a human hand rendering a thought rather than an arithmetic certainty.

To view the sequential ordering of Colville’s preliminary drawings is to witness a conversation between these two distinct visual languages. The control of abstract truth against the unreliability of memory, on page after page the different qualities of lines alone show the dialogue between competing kinds of authenticity—one based on unchanging law, and another on the messiness of experience.

What universe has Colville created? The great gift of his art is that it spans so many different ways of thinking and acting artistically and humanly. It comes out of a process of active engagement with immutable facts exemplified in perfect ratios and proportions, and in the courageous entanglement with his and his generation’s memory.

Colville allowed that the perfection of a linear equation has its absolute foil in the chaotic affront of aggression and evil. This confrontation is for me profoundly evident in the way he deliberately and delicately draws, setting down ideas and forms in very different ways.

In the tension between the two, Colville knew that there is a very, very thin veneer between honesty and lies, order and chaos, the human and non-human, and between living and dying.

[Alex Colville, Self Portrait, 1979; Study for On a River, 6 October 1995; Study for Woman with Revolver, 24, 1986]

Aba Bayefsky always considered himself a figurative artist.

Born in 1923, he and his generation of Canadians inherited a national art history that privileged the landscape as the primary conveyor of meaning. But for him, the human figure had as much claim, if not more, on expressing meaning than a Jack Pine or an Algoma canyon.

Bayefsky had the rare artistic talent to lend humanity and life to the subjects he depicted. Vitality and dynamism are hallmarks of his compositions as much as a keenly attuned eye for expressing immutable human values through the unique language of figurative art.

After graduating from high school in 1942, Bayefsky enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. By the spring of 1945, he was in Lunenburg, Germany, with the Second Tactical Air Force, 39 Reconnaissance Wing, then stationed near the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Given Bayefsky’s privileged status and “flexibility” as a war artist, shortly after arriving in Lunenburg, and after hearing about the camp, he “went over to it” (as he commented to a biographer). In fact, he arrived at the Bergen-Belsen gates, armed with a camera that he always had with him, just days after the camp was liberated by the advancing British, Canadian and American Expeditionary Forces, in late April 1945. He documented in film what he witnessed.

Aba Bayefsky, Bergen Belsen, Germany, 1945. Collection of Yad Vashem Photo Archive.

Bayefsky commented that, “the horror of it is difficult to say” especially when he realized from the very minute he set foot in the place that the citizens of the surrounding communities knew about the camp, what its purpose was, and what crimes were being perpetrated on inmates behind the barbed wire.

Bayefsky admitted that when inside the camp he “became aware for the first time of what hate, malice and prejudice can do.” From that moment, he realized that he would place his art “at the disposal of social progress and enlightenment.” He no longer believed that art could be set apart from the life it portrayed and the society in which it was created. Art, for Bayefsky, took on the fundamental requirement that it had to be a “common property to all” and used – “enlisted” – to advance peace and progress. He accepted that there was no “point in my drawing aeroplanes any longer.” As a witness to genocide – “it was just vicious spectacle” – Bayefsky found this moral imperative as an artist: produce a visual testament of the maginitude of the crimes.

Home from the war, Bayefsky’s pledge was, “this must never happen again….I have simply not been able, I didn’t have the luxury of forgetting that.” Near the end of his life, he stated that, “Every so often I turned my skills, whatever they are, to trying to say something about it. And I just simply think, you know, the older I get, the less time I have, the more I believe that art should say something. It has to say something to be meaningful.”

In the mid 1990s, Bayefsky revisited a theme that he first explored immediately after the war in a series of paintings and drawings he called his “Epilogue Series,” comprising drawings of dancing skeletons, dressed variously in army uniforms, wearing medals, or gesturing in macabre, darkly humorous ways. For Bayefsky, the series provided him a manner of returning to earlier memories of chaos and trauma, and of representing in art the catastrophe of the Holocaust as he experienced it.

Bayefsky stated that, “I’m doing these works, and it’s brought back a lot of where I have been.” In the process of working on the Epilogue paintings and drawings, he realized that they were summative works, drawing together many different themes and concerns that he explored in his art over the course of his professional career. “The more I think of it the more I understand that my work is essentially a statement, and in large measure a political statement.” For Bayefsky, life had an urgency to it, an urgency that he expressed as artistic jeremiads that exposed power and evil in all its forms. His voice resonates today.

[Aba Bayefsky:

· All Quiet on the Western Front, 1988. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Canadian War Museum

· Untitled (#336), 1988. Chalk on paper

· Remembering the Holocaust, 1988. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Canadian War Museum]

Of all the visual arts, drawing has a special magic. At some point in our life, we have all drawn something. It might have been a dashed-off doodle, not much more than an aimless exercise in making abstract marks on a piece of paper. It could also have been a more concentrated effort at rendering a particular scene or person, often a challenging exercise that makes you face the fact that it is difficult to translate what you see with what appears on the paper in front of you. Drawing might also be a release of deeper-felt emotions, an expression of passion exceeding the bounds of representation of something recognizable in the outside world. Drawings of an inner landscape are unfettered by the necessity that they “look” like something. Their meaning is felt.

Some drawings have the capacity to say much about the times in which they were made. Think of a beautiful Rembrandt drawing, or another of an orchard by van Gogh, who set down on paper with graphite and charcoal a telling image that has the potential of speaking eloquently, mysteriously and truthfully about the present day.

One spring afternoon a few years ago, I found myself marveling at this art form’s raw power. I was attending a small, intimate gallery talk by two curators who were preparing an exhibition of drawings by the Canadian, John Scott, who passed away in 2022. Scott left us a remarkably expressive body of work. All his artworks exhibit some form of drawing, which allowed him to express the inner depths of his soul and his fears about the future of humankind.

At heart, Scott was a storyteller who turned his great gifts to representing the consequences of aggression by forces that, when unleashed in society, seem intent on utter destruction—a meaning that is disturbingly relevant today.

One of his more remarkable works of art involves a muscle car that he transformed into a prophetic agent announcing end times. He completely covered a Pontiac Trans Am in black paint and then scratched—drew—the entire text of the biblical Book of Revelation into the dark, metallic surface. The result, a drawing of a different sort, is a frighteningly potent symbol of the consequences of unbridled, toxic violence.

In a vast number of drawings, Scott created a mythical cast of characters and a world that was constantly under threat of annihilation. His styles built upon the great twentieth century movement of Expressionism whose purpose was to provide the means for an artist to visualize in the most direct ways strong emotions that were stimulated by trauma, war, authoritarianism and a sense of powerlessness in the face of brutality.

A Scott drawing might be populated by stealth bombers or cruise missiles whose menacing presences in his compositions instill fear and terror in a sensitive viewer. Scott’s dystopian worlds are populated by strange fictional creatures with long, serrated ears resembling horrific, mutilated rabbits. In many drawings a shadowy figure he called “Dark Comander” (the misspelling was deliberate) looms out of the foggy space as a frightful, whose presence is both a threat and a warning.

Scott’s great skill with drawing lay in his ability to give form not only to his personal ghosts and fears, but also to visualize the demons that cast long shadows over the present. For him, drawing was much more than a means of interpreting what he saw before his eyes. It was a way to tap into something much more primal that existed inside him. Drawing let these spectres flow out into the world and onto his paper, canvas, or the surface of an automobile in as unrestricted a manner as possible.

Although dark, foreboding and challenging, Scott’s brutally honest drawings bring to light indescribable forces that seek to destroy worlds, his and ours.

[John Scott:

No Freedom, 1995, mixed media on paper mounted to foam-core.

Trans Am, Apocalypse No. 3, 2000.

Dark Comander, 2012, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas]

The meandering drive along the Hudson River on a spring morning gives much to delight the eye. The river appears and disappears as the roadway twists and turns along the edges of the riverbank whose cliffs resemble palisades rising from the water.

Gazing across to the opposite bank, the distance compresses in a way that mimics how an abstract painting might be flattened in order to highlight the play of one colour with the next. The cliffside of exposed rock and of trees gripping any available foothold is blurred by the humidity and foggy haze to such a subtle degree that you might wonder if, in fact, you have wandered into a colourfield painting. Such is the magical effect that the blend of light, atmosphere and place has created to confuse your perceptions of what is real, and what might be a mirage-like dreamscape.

I suspect that this blurring of realities caused by light and water is the reason that the Hudson River has inspired so many artists over the past centuries. The paintings and drawings of the river that survive today are not so much descriptions of specific locations as they are attempts to capture the effects of this light and translating it into a visual poetry that uniquely evokes the place while also stopping time.

I have long marveled at the painters who have set their brushes to canvas or pencils to paper to render this river as art. Nineteenth-century American masters Thomas Cole and his near contemporary Thomas Moran were among of the earliest painters to describe the river in oil paints. They introduced a manner and painterly language, based on pictorial conventions that seemed ideally suited to describing place as an ephemeral dream rather than as an aggregation of landforms.

The ideas that Cole and Moran expressed were catalysts for a great deal of artistic activity. In many respects, the Hudson River became to American painters what the northlands represented to Canadian painters of the early twentieth century. It was a source of infinite variations on the simple truth of living a life infused with an appreciation of eternity.

The agent that inspired these ideas was light. The generations of artists that followed Cole and Moran throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought their own sensibilities to bear to interpret light as it radiated in and around the Hudson River.

My drive on this morning, however, is prompted not by paintings, but by pencil drawings of this landscape. My curiosity is stirred by words—not colours—that a group of nineteenth century artists from the school of “Luminists” wrote on their drawings to remind them of the ever-changing qualities of light. I am studying a small collection of sketches that were used as field notes that were worked up as finished paintings back in the studio.

I am also equally interested in the fact that these old drawings were collected by one of the twentieth century’s more innovative artists, Dan Flavin. He created some of the more compellingly original sculptures by using fluorescent light tubing. The experience of a Flavin light sculpture—what he called “lights”—is akin to entering a radiant environment illuminated by coloured energy. It is completely absorbing. As you appreciate one of his pieces, the sense of an object comprising tubes and wires disappears. You are absorbed into the lit space of the sculpture.

Curators usually inform us that Flavin’s art has few, if any, external references. They are self-referential, about themselves and the qualities of the materials that appear right before the eyes.

But Flavin collected historical Hudson River drawings that are the very antithesis of what he produced as an artist.

The destination of my drive is Flavin’s home and studio overlooking a particularly picturesque bend in the river. Once in his studio I am shown a large portfolio of his own drawings, done earlier in his career, that emulate the nineteenth century examples. They reveal that he had a fascination for the Hudson River and for interpreting its endlessly interesting variations. The drawings trace his own treks up and down the river from its source in the Adirondack Mountains to the tidal estuaries that separate New York City from New Jersey.

A close look at his drawings also shows that he made written notations on them— notes set down in a kind of haiku that attempts to describe light as energy and colour. These words—a personal poetry of light—are the sources for an entirely innovative career that began with a thoughtful meditation on a river’s light.

[Dan Flavin, Installation view of Fluorescent Light Sculptures]

[Thomas Cole. On Catskill Creek, Sunset, ca. 1845–47]

[Dan Flavin, Sailing Across Gardner’s Bay Near Lion Head Beach (To Thomas Moran)]

Best known for his watercolours and prints, the early twentieth century English artist Eric Ravilious translated his love of land into images that are appreciated for their technical facility and for the way they capture the unique experience of place, even one on the verge of peril.

Weather and topography, light and texture, his paintings and prints embody a reverent encounter with England’s South Downs. His subject matter focuses on the unassuming and the non-picturesque elements of the countryside, which he interprets in a cheerful, pastoral mode. In his hands, the particular signatures of a region are drawn out, exposed in an understated way, the better to distill the essence of their defining, charming characteristics. The roll of a hill, the interplay of fence and pasture, patterns of crop and grass, croft and house, these establish visual rhythms in a Ravilious composition that guide the eye in and through the tended worlds that spelled order and serenity to a Britain recovering from the Great War.

Design is a defining quality of Ravilious’ work in all media; modernism is a distant cousin. The nomenclature of discordancy, asymmetry, dynamic contrasts and intersecting planes, even a pseudo-Cubist construction of space and perspective are faintly, if ever, detected in his work. Where his contemporary Paul Nash experimented with visual idioms that simulated the inner cataclysms that Britons of Ravilious’ generation felt, he clung to a temperate mode that held to the musicality and harmony of a pastoral lyric.

The consequence of his orderly provincialism is a sense of cool detachment, even disengagement with his subject in the context of interwar England, to the extent that his landscapes might appear manufactured, mythic emanations of more innocent days. Beauty, order, harmonious relationships, tonal melody, sensual linearity and an orderly realism rescue Ravilious from treacly mediocrity. Without question, his work provided object lessons for describing a world – even one preserved in amber – exempt from chaos, and with an uncanny restraint that freighted his compositions with understated truths.

An impulse to get things down as they were before the eye guided Ravilious’ hand as he gazed at the landscape. The worlds he created were built on the architecture of finely seen drawing, and an innate grasp of compositional balance, to the extent that his pictures reflect a rule-based process of visual art. Their well-drawn foundation was usually only lightly coloured in, giving his work and their subjects a slightly dazzling air so that their uncanny quality is in the antithesis of what he might have intended. Whereas the combination of elements that constitute his watercolours and prints – structure, harmony, lyricism, exceptional composition, structure – blend with the sense of emotional disengagement and a forced nostalgia, they all contribute to a vaguely surreal, even magic-realist pall falling on a landscape.

Under his brush, the ordinariness of home is burnished to a fine degree until it is transformed into strange, untouched and untouchable kingdoms that are perfect foils to a country devastated physically, emotionally and spiritually by war. If viewers turned to Ravilious to find comfort, it was consolation from grief and anxiety. Ravilious served up an artistic tonic that quelled the pain of national loss and disequilibrium, by holding the mirage and the promise of a word transformed into a calm, lyrical poem.

[Eric Ravilious, Wiltshire Landscape, watercolour, 1937]

The small rectangular panel paintings by the seventeenth century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer contain entire worlds of light and emotion.

Through their compact compositions, he tells truths about the human condition in ways that remain miraculously relevant today, three and a half centuries after they were painted.

The effect of stopping time on a panel has held me captive to Vermeer’s charms and beauty since I first set eyes on one of his perfect paintings in New York City thirty years ago. The experience has me on the trail to see every one of his paintings over the course of my life.

The hunt has taken me to the stately, orderly Dutch capital city of The Hague on an early autumn afternoon. This is the seat of the World Court, a palatial, if dour-looking, palace off one of the city’s neatly groomed avenues, and just around the corner from the Museum Mesdag – a surprisingly rich and relatively unknown collection of nineteenth-century Dutch paintings that are exhibited in a beautifully restored, elegant mansion, now administered by Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.

The Mesdag experience transports you back to the cultural climate that surrounded van Gogh. It provides a rich array of work that inspired him. Here are his elders all of whom appear to have favoured dark, gloomy palettes and muted colours that epitomize the term “Old Master.” There is a sense of weight and authority to their canvases, a heaviness that seems to accord with a Dutch characteristic for pragmatism and orderliness.

Looking deeper though, something else shines through the dark varnishes. There is an elegance of drawing and line that vividly renders their subjects incongruously as if alive. A strange feeling, because one might expect that the many hundreds of paintings that are arranged in dense ranks on these walls are removed from the hustle and noise outside. Mute artifacts with little contemporary relevance.

But, in the quiet they whisper a message across the centuries: a kind of soft siren that touches you deeply, causing you to pause and listen intently for more.

The miracle of Dutch painting is the manner in which it captures sound and light. What is it about the sensibility of these artists that can so acutely transmit in oil paint sonic textures and frequencies that were first heard lifetimes ago? And, how is it they can so realistically describe light? Perhaps more than any others, these artists embraced an abstract principle long before the modernists of the twentieth century. All painting is essentially abstract; their project was to analyze and describe in their media the formal properties of light and space, and they turned their prodigious talents to recasting them in paint.

This is the legacy of Vermeer. A visit with the Mesdag’s masters provides a fitting introduction to another museum experience just a few blocks away at the beautifully proportioned Mauritshuis Museum that appears to float on a reflecting pool surrounding much of this palatial picture gallery.

Like its museum neighbour, the Mauritshuis has a human scale. There is a calm pacing to the way one gallery flows into the other, which lends the experience of looking a leisurely yet deliberate pace. Where the Mesdag gives a sense of gravity and weight, this museum imparts lightness. The severity of the nineteenth century is replaced with an uncharacteristically prideful optimism that fills the spaces.

My destination is a small gallery that lies in the middle of a long warren of rooms on which hangs Vermeer’s portrait of a girl wearing a blue headscarf and a pearl earring. The young model peers out radiantly from the mahogany panels as vividly as she did centuries before when standing in the artist’s studio in the nearby town of Delft.

The painting is mesmerizing. I am locked in place by this young woman’s gaze over her shoulder.

I wonder where its life originates. Is it in the materials that made this gem? Is it in the almost indescribably rich blue band of the scarf that it a blend of ages-old lapis lazuli and ultramarine? Or is it in the way the light bathes the soft, rounded forms of her head?

It is all of these individual parts, that when added up, set the stage for the truly mystical experience of this painting. In the deep contrasts between light and dark that separates the model from us, and in the infinite blackness of the background, there is a sense of time and space being captured.

Vermeer’s great gift lies in the manner that he conjures the sense of living in a way that engages several senses at the same time. The visual, the aural, the tactile, in the humble interpretation of a human being, now long passed away, he tells us a deep truth about ourselves and the present world. This mysterious ability has me on the trail to see all his work in a lifetime—the better to understand his and mine.

[Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Oil on canvas, 1665]

When I was in Florence a few days before Christmas a couple of decades ago, an archangel revealed some secrets to me.

Not a real angel, but an artist named “Arcangelo” who painted in Tuscany more than six centuries ago. A set of two of his smaller paintings, each not much larger than a book’s page, helped me understand an episode in the development of painting, and told me much about Christmas.

Very little is known about this mysterious, talented artist whose full name was Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino. In fact, not many of his paintings have survived. Those that have are evidence of a painter whose modest productions advanced the way we see the world today and gave us a style that we have come to name “Realism.”

Arcangelo was an itinerant artist. He travelled around central Europe in the last years of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries painting religious panels that were small and portable. They were carried around and read in the same way as a book, except the paintings alone told the story. Their pictures, vividly illustrating Biblical stories, had backgrounds dazzlingly coloured by microscopically thin sheets of gold foil which gave the pictures a wondrous presence. They were crafted to be representations of heaven itself and its saintly inhabitants.

Arcangelo’s journeys took him to several different countries where he learned much from artists who worked in very different painterly styles and traditions. From artists in the northern principalities that now form Germany and Austria, he learned how to draw using only lines, not tones. From the Italians he absorbed lessons about how colours could be used to induce great emotions. From the regions of present-day Hungary, he saw how a painting could imitate the qualities of sculpture. In other words, he found a secret for making something look three-dimensional in the two-dimensions of flat painting.

Whether Arcangelo was a priest as well as an artist is unknown, but he was a very clever and creative man who took the emerging ideas of rationalism and painted them into his portraits of saints. This was a radical shift in what everyone thought of as the role of sacred painting.

Arcangelo portrayed his subjects as if they were right before his and our eyes. Heaven and its saints were not abstractions. Under his brush he made the sacred look alive. Breathing beings, not sacred emanations, sat in a believably deep space of his paintings.

He took these lessons with him on his travels, teaching his followers how to make heaven look real. Challenging the authority of mystery, Arcangelo encouraged people who viewed his paintings to see holiness in the world around them and in the people they met on the streets.

Half a millennium later, I held one of his panels in my hands. An odd feeling of peace came over me me as I studied this humble portrait of a mother and her baby son, a common enough subject in Christian art that is known as a “Nativity.” Yet, this was no ordinary interpretation of it. Where I expected a majestic, regal depiction of the Christ Child, Arcangelo unexpectedly gives a rendition of an ordinary baby boy sitting on his mother’s lap.

Perhaps among the first to do so, Arcangelo cast his subjects in terms of living human beings. The mother stares contentedly straight out of the composition at me. The child appears to be impatiently squirming on a lap that occupies depth and space in the picture. The folds on the garments move my eye all around the panels, even in and out of the illusion of reality in which these two human beings are posed. If the artist is declaring anything it is the simple fact that these people existed and continue to exist in a timeless way. The scene was as true on the day I sat looking at it as it had been on the day it was painted.

[Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, The Madonna and Child, Enthroned; Crucifixion, 1410-1429]

Several springs ago I hopped on the wrong train in Assisi and found myself in Perugia.

I had gotten confused while on my way to the transfer station in nearby Foligno, and found, to my surprise, that I was traveling in the wrong direction, back to Florence, instead of heading to the Marche.

In the still, quiet of that early spring evening I had some time while I waited for the next train east to reflect on the beautiful stillness of this storied Umbrian city and the magic of its artists who worked in and around the town.

Very near the platform I was standing on, half a millennia earlier, perhaps one of the least known, but certainly one of the more talented Renaissance painters, Pietro Perugino, lived and worked.

Perugino’s gentle, caressing line, a hallmark of this fifteenth century master’s work, appeared vividly in my imagination that night. It might have been the disorienting suddenness of finding myself lost in Umbria, or the magical combination of natural elements that called this saintly painter to my mind. Whatever the combination of circumstances and associations, I immediately recognized in the moment that Perugino had captured the essence of this very evening all those centuries ago.

Perugino remains for me the quintessential artist of the human spirit. He painted in the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio, and just a few years before Raphael and Michelangelo burst upon the scene in Rome. The circumstance of their accomplishments, and that of the other artists who defined the Renaissance in painting, overshadowed the relatively more modest, introspective qualities that Perugino so beautifully rendered.

In many respects, he and several of his peers from Umbria and Fabriano painted in a very different, less heroic, yet no less magnificent way. They were the masters of another Renaissance altogether.

My reason for being in central Italy on that early spring evening was to study this “other Renaissance” that took place half a century before Michelangelo mounted his scaffold in the Sistine Chapel. I had spent the previous few days looking at the work of Gentile da Fabriano, born in the medieval manufacturing and papermaking town a couple of hours distant.

Perugino was the heir of Gentile’s artistic legacy.

Gentile spanned the worlds of the late Gothic and Renaissance when painting ceased to be solely representations of an abstracted heaven of angels and saints floating on fields of gold, and became instead a place populated by humans and heroes. Their unearthly landscapes were as lush and verdant as any seen in the Tuscan or Umbrian countryside.

Gentile’s small format panel paintings of religious subjects combine the intimacy of a meditative prayer book or missal with the dazzling glory of a jewel case. He painted with gold, lapis lazuli, brilliant lead whites, deep, intense greens, and with the rich, blood red sanguine colours of bole clay. Gentile’s creations extoll the sacredness of heaven, but he made certain that it was described in the recognizable features of the earth.

On his panels we see the saints and angels surrounded by clearly identifiable flowers set in a landscape that bears all the features of the hillside I was staring at in the twilight. Heaven and earth, the saintly and the human, the richness of the celestial sphere and the glory of the firmament, these were Gentile’s subjects. He had the god-given talent and mission to make it known to everyone who looked at and prayed before his pictures that heaven has an earthly look, and an angel a human form.

The mystery and enduring majesty of Gentile’s art is in the simple way he helped to move our imaginations seamlessly between realms of heaven and earth. The place of the angels and saints, he tells us, is not alien, incomprehensible, beyond the grasp of mind and imagination. It can be known, as he shows us in his art, and be sensed by simply standing quietly, expectantly and reverently before the grand complexity of creation in front of our eyes.

Gentile da Fabriano and Perugino, two early Renaissance artists paved the way for the grand frescoes and paintings, great sculptures and imperial buildings that have come down to us today as examples of the highest expressions of the human spirit—gifts of the High Renaissance.

In the dying light as I boarded the train to Fabriano, I realized that in Perugino and Gentile the miracle and mystery of heaven could be seen in the deepening ultramarine of twilight on the other side of the platform in Perugia.

[Perugino, The Archangel Raphael with Tobias, 1496-1500; Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, 1423]