Ann Ferro: Viewing Van Gogh with new eyes

Last Saturday, as an early birthday present, my daughter took us to the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit in Rochester. And, Wow, as an experience, it is difficult to compare with others.

Visiting a museum that features Van Gogh’s paintings is a three dimensional manifestation, but this presentation is four dimensional. This was an experiential feast of sight and sound. The event’s production washed over me with the sweet sounds of color and music and the sheer loveliness of Van Gogh’s work. Van Gogh’s paintings surround you. The ceiling, walls and floor of the hall became the paintings. Music and narration brought the art into focus on other levels.

A litany of color and powerful brush strokes, “Sunflowers,” “Starry Night,” self portraits, portraits of neighbors, soft scenes from the countryside, waterside villages and more fill the space where you are a part. You are in the art. It takes your breath away. Meaningful narration accompanies the art, injecting information about Van Gogh’s travails with mental illness, alcoholism, malnutrition and poverty. As you absorb the 300 examples of Vincent Van Gogh’s work the narrator injects the dimension of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother where he characterizes his work as depictions of the everyday, the ordinary with pleas for understanding.

The melancholy strains of Don Mclean’s “Starry Starry Night” float out over the ceiling, the walls and the floors where there is no beginning or end. Some paintings are highlighted with additional color to emphasize his use of the color yellow. One painting morphs into another with digital brush strokes. Waters move. Stars fall and fall and fall. Pencil drawings become paintings. The academic becomes real.

As powerful, as beautiful as the work of Van Gogh, the creators of this exhibit deserve equal praise. Mathieu St-Arnaud and his team at Montreal’s Normal Studio have used modern digital power to present an experience of history and art that both educates and delights. As Van Gogh used paints and canvas to share his view or the world, this packaging of his work is an art form in itself, an art form that changes the viewer into a participant.

And then there was this:

We were accompanied at this event by our two grandsons, who were alternately interested and bored.

When they read that Van Gogh has cut off an ear, these middle school aficionados looked at me, eyes wide, and asked why. We talked a bit about mental illness and my explanation seemed to draw more eye rolls than understanding. I bundled that discussion for another day. And, at one point, as the art moved over the ceiling, the walls and floor, the narrator described the paintings as depictions of what Van Gogh saw from a small window in the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he spent a year. There were unplanned tears on my cheeks. Tommy, the eldest, even in the semi darkness of the experience, put his arm around me in gesture of comfort and commented, “ “I know grandma, they say this is a half hour presentation, but it feels more like two hours.” Oh, my. Twelve is perhaps too young for Van Gogh, but not for his always-gentle kindness.

While some purists decry manipulation and consequent commercialization of Van Gogh’s works, others, and I count myself as one of these, see this as a way to introduce the importance of art, not only for those who produce it, but as a means of connecting us through its appreciation, giving the participant something beyond appreciation, perhaps understanding.

Perhaps there is truth in Don Mclean’s “Vincent,” also known as “Starry, Starry Night.”

Maybe some lines from this lovely song are appropriate:

Starry, starry night

Flaming flowers that brightly blaze

Swirling clouds in violet haze

Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of China blue

Colors changing hue

Morning fields of amber grain

Weathered faces lined in pain

Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand

Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me

How you suffered for your sanity