Going back to School- the Eskenazi Museum in Bloomington, IN
John Robert Cozens, Sepulchral Remains in the Campagna near Rome, watercolor, ca. 1782-83, Eskenazi Museum of Art. Bloomington, IN About a thousand years ago (actually 1970) I moved to Bloomington, IN to enter Indiana University's MFA Program in Painting. As I had previously been one of only a few art students in the small art department at Oberlin College I was hungry to finally be surrounded by other committed artists. The experience at Indiana worked out well- better than I'd expected. More than for most of the other painting grad students, the campus art museum (now the Eskenazi Museum of Art) really spoke to me. I ended up taking a history of landscape painting course from one of the art history faculty, Louis Hawes. He had an almost fanatical enthusiasm for two early British watercolor painters, Cozens and Girtin that intrigued and delighted me. Thomas Girtin, Landscape with House , watercolor, c...