Tag Archives: Van Gogh

Not the Van Gogh trail

I know I’ve criticized the Van Gogh industry before – the posters, tea towels, coasters and the astronomical price tags on his originals. Underlying this is the fact that this master is known as much for his self-mutilation as for his paintings. Despite all that, I am a fan of Vincent Van Gogh. While I’ve tired of the ubiquitous sunflowers, I still get mesmerized by The Potato Eaters, the Japanese orchards and best of all discovering those lesser-known gems, those paintings secreted away in museum corners waiting for me to find them. With this in mind, I brushed aside my misgivings about commercializing dead artists and headed off to Arles, France for a day trip.

Van Gogh only lived in Arles for fifteen months. He spent more time in Paris (2 years) and in Brixton, London (3 years). Yet Arles tourism has etched out a place for the master since after all in Arles, Van Gogh made over 300 paintings and drawings, some of his best-known works. That was enough to convince me it would be worth doing the Van Gogh trail with the hope of discovering something new, or as in the case of Paul Cezanne in Aix-en-Provence, get a feel for how the artist once lived.

The tourist office provided a map of walks in and around Arles, of which the footsteps of Van Gogh were included. There were six places of interest, with two of those places not existing as they once did – the famous yellow house where he lived with Paul Gaugin for a while was bombed out during WW2. The other ghost site was the view from the river, which Van Gogh famously painted. Today the view is mostly cluttered with 1980s apartment blocks. I saw the ‘night café’ in the daytime which is when it is now at its liveliest, full of tourists taking photos while locals try to have their espressos in peace. The public gardens and most of the stone bridge were still intact, evoking images vaguely reminiscent of Van Gogh’s landscapes. Perhaps that couldn’t be helped – what my eyes witnessed were closer to photographs than impressionist paintings.

What about the paintings and drawings? Two museums were on the Van Gogh trail. The one didn’t have any artworks but could boast having one letter written by Van Gogh to Gaugin. The other museum, the Foundation Vincent Van Gogh, not living up to its name housed five paintings by Van Gogh and bizarrely had them on display in an exhibition of female abstract artists. Yet, among those five I did find the gem – the painting I hadn’t seen before. Les Epis Verts is of shafts of green wheat in a field somewhere around Arles and was painted in 1888.

It is ironic that on the rare occasion I was prepared to not be cynical about commercializing art and overkill of the great masters, I was left underwhelmed and wanting more. C’est la vie.

Les épis verts (1888)

Starry, Starry Night

I’m hoping this blog will purge the song from my head. The original tune by Don Mclean was never a favourite. Like its topic, the life and paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, it’s riddled with clichés and imagery of the ubiquitous works of art. The song was released when I was nine and Van Gogh was already an industry. Like any self-respecting kid, I rebelled against things cross-generational and ultra-popular. I adopted the view that Van Gogh wasn’t such a great painter, but merely the first pop artist, creating his own celebrity as he suffered for his sanity, clipped off his own earlobe and took his own life as lovers often do.Starry starry night 1

It wasn’t until I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam some 25 years later that I felt a genuine admiration for the artist’s work. Yes, of course, Vincent (I think we’re on first names here) is still an industry, arguably an even larger one than he was in my childhood. But he’s not just about starry nights after a day of daffodils that catch the breeze from the painter with a severed ear. There’s the earthiness of his potato eaters and the delicacy of his Japanese-style almond trees that speak volumes for his skill and renderings of life around him and in his imagination (he never went to Japan). I’ve since toured the museum a few more times, searching for the lesser known works and avoiding the gift shop.

The song wouldn’t have lodged in my head had it not been for a reinterpretation by Lianne La Havas which featured at the end of the film Loving Vincent. La Havas’s version is more soulful, slightly less melodic, than Mclean’s. In case you haven’t seen it or heard about it, Loving Vincent (directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman) is an animation using Van Gogh’s paintings for the scenes and characters, including the master himself. It’s the only film of its kind, using 125 artists to hand paint the 65,000 frames. Many of the scenes appear to move slightly as if being painted or repainted before our very eyes – it’s visually hypnotic. This entrancing state is helped by the soft, rhythmic soundtrack (by Clint Mansell) to lift the audience into another world. The only thing holding the film back, as many critics have noted, is the mediocre script that revolves around the artist’s sudden death, suggesting that it wasn’t intentional.

Nevertheless, this melange of paintings, film and music needed to come together for me to remember, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. (Oh, I wish it would stop). Starry starry night 3