Life can get pretty meta these days. No, we’re not talking about the parent company of Facebook, but the concept of a thing within the thing.
Case in point: Imagine sitting on a bench with artist Joe Fig in the Sarasota Art Museum, where his one-man show Joe Fig: Contemplating Vermeer is on display. Fig is explaining how he would use photography and software to create a painting of SAM visitors looking at his portrait of museumgoers studying Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. As they used to say back in the ’60s—mind-blowing.
Fig, department chair of the Fine Arts and Visual Studies programs at Ringling College of Art and Design, traveled to Amsterdam with his son in May 2023.
Like more than 660,000 visitors from over 100 countries, father and son were drawn by the Rijksmuseum’s unprecedented Vermeer exhibition. The show included 28 of the 36 surviving masterpieces said to have been painted by the Dutch painter.
The trip was motivated by the desire to see the epic exhibition, but Fig also had it in his mind to paint portraits of those looking at the Vermeer paintings.
Fig, who is represented by the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York City, is known for his detailed paintings of the intimate spaces where artists create their work. He is the author of Inside the Artist’s Studio and Inside the Painter’s Studio.
