Luc Travers

[Jonathan]

I saw today over on OO that Comrade Sonia is promoting Luc Travers' art webcast.

If you haven't seen Travers' video presentations, he's an Objectivist art enthusiast who teaches at the Van Damme Academy, and he wants to show people how they can get meaning from paintings by "reading" them directly, and without relying on art history sources (what Rand called "outside considerations").

He comes across to me as someone who has read up on lots of art history sources and then pretends to be dead-reading from the paintings the information he got from those sources. And then he inevitably gives in and makes lots of direct references to outside information in order to explain what's going on in a painting (by that time, I think the class or audience is supposed to have forgotten that the original point was to avoid outside sources).

Those interested may want to watch his videos on Jules Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc, in which he somehow fails to notice that Joan is leaning against a tree, and he therefore misreads her body as not relaxed, but as tense and rigid! (In his videos, Travers doesn't seem to comment much on the visual or painterly characteristics of an image, like lighting, color, modulation and composition, so perhaps in the art history courses that he took he didn't learn to look for things like shadows or other visual indicators of where objects are positioned in relationship to each other within the perspective of the depicted space.)

Anyway, despite these obvious flaws, the videos are fun and informative, and Travers brings a lot of passion to what he does.

J