After two failed attempts of post-secondary education in pre-med and then in nursing, I took a year’s break to find my fortune (a.k.a. work three part-time jobs) by scooping ice cream, peddling auto accessories, and being a very cheerful bank teller – until the end of my shift when I failed to balance my cash more often than not. Thus buoyed with such success, I returned to the University of Alberta, this time in the Faculty of Arts.

Sometimes I think that if I had been a better student, maybe I would remember more. After all, saying you have a History Degree demands some sort of off-the-cuff knowledge of dates and wars and plagues. (I will NOT, however, forget 2020 and COVID-19.) But the things I do remember are scant and sorted – dumbfounding, really, considering the price tag of my university education and the number of hours I stood behind the cash register in West Edmonton Mall selling radar detectors to pay for said education. (Oh, and for coffee at Java Jive.)

Although I disposed of many of my course textbooks after packing and moving them one too many times, there are a couple of survivors, one of them being my Janson Art History textbook. Paging through, it reads fluorescently: I highlighted 95% of the words. But little of it is familiar and I cannot remember what my final grade was.

Albeit, there are snapshots in my brain: my tiny, elder art history professor, whose passion for art was not dulled to me though I chose to sit near the back of the 400-person Tory Lecture Theatre. I do remember how she chose very specific paintings to represent whole swathes of time. One of those was the famous Arnolfini Wedding.

Maybe you’ve seen this painting before: a very pregnant bride, dressed in verdant green, holds her gentleman’s hand as they pose for a wedding portrait. Her coveted fertility has been obviously secured and she, in turn, has locked in her future as a merchant’s mistress. She is coyly looking down; the husband is confidently facing the artist. And directly in the background, the clever artist has painted a mirror and thus inserted a teeny-tiny self-portrait.

Art can capture not only the subject itself but context, humor, secrets. A photograph of your childhood remembers that favorite cream pitcher shaped like a milk cow but you also remember how you dropped it and it smashed on the floor, splattering droplets of cream everywhere. A portrait like the Mona Lisa begs many questions: Who is she? What’s with the weird landscape in the background? What the heck is she smiling about? And modern fashion or architecture can be baffling to the untrained eye.

If you’re not already versed in a subject and know what to look for, only someone “in the know” can really tell you what the photograph or painting or Cake-Boss cake or is really about. Even better is when they can tell you the additional info that lay within like layers of paint on the canvas.

All seems well in Arnolfini Wedding portrait. The room reflects wealth and happily, the couple are expecting an heir. At a time before iPhones or even cameras, one had to be wealthy to even commission such a portrait, to immortalize yourself among the faceless masses. It seems oddly brazen to advertise the maiden’s state as she is entering the marriage contract but the dog is there to symbolize the fidelity that belongs to the marriage bond.

Unfortunately, the couple never had any children. You can’t see it in the painting, but it is part of the story.

Art, and people, are often so much more than what a first or even a second glance offers. All those myriad iPhone photos on Instagram and Facebook? There’s more than meets the eye there, too. Every picture and every person has a story and every story is worth telling and worth hearing. Not just seeing.