Utrecht University - Modern and Contemporary Art
Starting February 2017 and continuing until the end of June I was kept company in the museum by a student from Utrecht University on an internship assignment for her bachelors degree. Evely Reijnders was self-motivated and driven to find out what was happening beyond the usual art scene in this part of Europe and had spent some time in Beirut working on an art project. Here in this space and research effort she went on an intellectual journey to find out and put into writing how ideally the museum's website should look for me to present to website designers and plumbers and have them execute it to save me time to concentrate on content. In the meantime she was pleasant company and helped me out receiving visitors if I was not available and even finding a book for me in the Utrecht Library about something entirely different: minor Florentine painters of the 15th century, which subject distracted me for a number of days after spontaneously and unexpectantly buying a painting of John the Baptist (Yahya ibn Zakariya) which turned up at Christies Amsterdam and was ignored by everybody but me.
I made her portrait here in front of Ahmed Mater's photograph Social Fabric, which is part of his Desert of Pharan series.
July 23, 2017.
A.H.