Gogh!

 

See this picture?

It’s my new favorite picture. Well, maybe not my favorite, but after Sunday, it’s one that definitely intrigues me.

What happened Sunday that triggered this interest in a painting I had never seen before?

The painting is called “Starry Night over the Rhone,” and was created in September of 1888 by Vincent Van Gogh. On Sunday I saw it for the first time. Well, not the original, for that sits in a museum in Paris. No, the “Starry Night over the Rhone” I saw was a replica at the Arlington Van Gogh Interactive Exhibit.

You must have seen the ubiquitous advertisements for the Van Gogh Interactive Exhibit. They’re all over the internet. I’ve been seeing them – and clicking away from them – for probably more than a year now.

But the wife thought it would be a neat thing to do with the little ones, now in high school and middle school. Patch, our just-turned-thirteen youngest, is a natural and gifted artist. Little One, now seventeen, has a keen photographer’s – and photoshopper’s – eye. I shrugged and figured it would be a pleasant ninety minutes, and I might learn something.

I’m here to tell you that if you have some time to kill, a modest interest in the arts, and about $40 to spend on a ticket, to go see it. Well worth it.

Unfortunately, the Mrs. booked it on a Sunday when the Cowboys were playing in town. Their stadium is adjacent to the old Rangers stadium, which is where the exhibit was located. (It did not take up the entire baseball stadium; it was a group of six or seven rectangular rooms, each of which could hold about twenty people.) Our tickets were for 3 pm, but we got there late, just as the football stadium was emptying out. Mobs of Cowboys fans cluttered the streets and caravans of cars cluttered the roadways egressing the surrounding parking lots.

So after a frustrating half hour we finally found parking for the exhibit. My only beef is that masks were mandatory. Two drunk Dallas fans – girthsome ladies wearing giant foam cowboy hats – followed us into the elevator. Once out, we showed our tickets and went inside. The ladies asked for a bathroom, and were politely declined.

The first rooms held replicas of Van Gogh’s paintings as well as giant boards detailing his tragic life. I knew he died young by his own hand – Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas as the tormented painter is one of my favorite biopics – but did not know that he died at age 37. I saw his self-portraits, his sunflower paintings, the swirling, more famous, other “Starry Night,” among many others.

Then we got to the interactive rooms.

This was my first taste of V-R, virtual reality, and it blew me away. We sat on stools and put on the V-R helmets, and I was Van Gogh. I rose from my bed in my Spartan room, went down the stairs, exited, walked through town, through a meadow, down to the docks. Along the way I talked about art, colors, expression. Paintings would materialize out of thin air putting my words into action. I could turn this way and that, stare at a cow, at ravens, at the blue and red houses along the river where Van Gogh himself lived and painted. It was hyper-surreal and I enjoyed it immensely.

Another room held three-dimensional representations of his paintings. The one I found most interesting was one of his room, which he painted three different times three different ways. After that we went up stairs into the largest rectangular room, where dozens of projectors flashed moving paintings and images of the painter, morphing this way and that, drizzling along the floor, spiraling among the ceiling. The orbs of starry night spun weblike among the walls. The rivers undulated and pulsated acid-trip like around us. And all the while the most beautiful soundtrack played. Not quite Debussy, but just as evocative.

The last room was a gift shop. Because the wife bought us VIP tickets, we all got posters. We’ll frame one. The girls bought earrings which featured a Van Gogh motif. I asked the lady behind the counter if they sold a CD of the music we heard in the immersion room. She said no, and commented that a lot of people ask for that.

So I learned a little bit about Vincent Van Gogh. Both my girls painted their interpretations of the other, more famous “Starry Night” in school. I framed Little One’s, but when Patch got to do her version Covid hit, and we never were able to retrieve it from the school. I had wanted to frame both and hang them side by side in my writing office. Oh well. I have other Patch works to frame, once they’re all unpacked.

Afterwards we hit the girls favorite Dallas sushi bar, that one a mile or two from Dealey Plaza I blogged about way back in August.

Oh, I forgot to mention – passing through the gift store, in a good-natured attempt to embarrass my three girls, I loudly exclaimed, in a moderately crowed room, “So this VAN GOGG [rhymes with “bog”], he was a painter?!?!?”