They're Making Dutch Golden Age Art in Minecraft
And by "they" I mean 23-year-old furries from the Netherlands
This month I’ll be publishing a series of articles about strange things happening in and around Minecraft. Today’s piece is a short image gallery and Q&A featuring a Dutch artist who makes beautiful landscapes using a modded version of the game.
I started writing Push to Talk in part because I wanted to highlight some of the very strange ways that video games interact with culture. There are all these weird cultural offshoots from games that most people aren’t aware of. And maybe one of the best examples of this I’ve come across recently is the work of Manofdutch, a poster on X who often goes viral by using Minecraft to build landscapes and architecture inspired by Dutch Golden Age paintings.
I mostly want to just show you what this looks like. What follows is a very short Q&A with Manofdutch, who is a recent university graduate from the Netherlands.
PUSH TO TALK: I wonder if you could speak about your artistic inspirations?
MANOFDUTCH: Mainly Wes Anderson films, especially on my YouTube channel, where I make videos in his style. My builds also have that quality, as well as some inspiration from the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, with the lighting of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
You're doing so many of these beautiful Minecraft builds. What kind of time commitment is going into these? And is this your fulltime thing? (I see your Patreon seems to have a lot of members!)
A lot of time goes into my builds, between the research and building. For example, my most recent map (The Last of Us) took around six months and 1,000+ hours to make, and Corvin Castle was around a month of work. I do not do these as a full-time thing, but rather as something to enjoy. I primarily built these when I was in university and during my internship, when things got stale.
What's your backstory? How'd you get into doing this?
I was kinda bored and wanted to do something creative. And I thought, why not play Minecraft again, when my internship is slow in the off-season? I’m not an architect or designer or in a creative industry. My degree, and hopefully future job, is in health and safety. Maybe chemical safety or a security management position.
Do you think you'll keep doing this stuff once you start a full time job?
Most likely I will either slow down or I will reduce the map size since it does not pay a living wage or any decent amount of money. Most likely I will start next year with a new job! These builds take a lot of time: around two to five months.
Let's talk about a specific creation, like this one (see above). What all went into this, both in terms of the mods and the effort you put into it?
The creation of that castle went as follows: A good friend and awesome map maker, RedlikeRanger, makes cool terrain. I built a giant castle and added my own flair of shaders, which I make myself to really make the build pop (it does lag your PC to around 10fps, but it’s worth it). For the mods, I keep things simple. Conquest Reforged and the Falling Leaves mod to get that cool leaves effect! It wasn’t much effort, since the terrain was already there and I just needed to make the castle and the cinematic viewpoints, which I am very good at.
What do people not understand about this particular slice of the Minecraft community that you think is interesting?
There is still kind of a taboo or something about the Conquest Reforged mod adding all these other blocks and making things rather too realistic—like it’s no longer Minecraft (hahaha). I do understand that vanilla Minecraft is something cool and fun to play, but I mainly use it for artistic expression rather then gameplay.
Coda
I love the idea that some criticize Manofdutch’s preferred mod on the grounds that it’s “no longer Minecraft…” as if transforming a piece of software into something new is somehow a bad thing. It is an interesting question, though: At what point does a video game become something else? Somewhere the line between “game” and “3D voxel art sculpting software” gets blurred.
In Minecraft, as in all things, the only certainty is change. Change in our lives, and in the built environments that surround us. If you’re a young person in the modern world your environment almost certainly includes this game, which has sold over 350 million copies—more than any other in history. But the Minecraft that players find now bears little resemblance to the alpha version I bought off of Notch’s website in 2010.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish a series of interviews with creative people who’ve been working to change Minecraft in unexpected ways, beginning with the director of a full-length Minecraft movie that has earned (so far) 17 million views. There are many strange things happening in this little digital world made of cubes. Was Minecraft ever just a game? Or was it the first emergence of something new, something for which we didn’t yet have the language? We’ll see.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go do some crayon drawings with my 5-year-old.
Coda... I feel like you must be reading Paul Krugman's substack...
This is very cool