“We reveal our worlds” (Post 91)

Last night I spent some time with friends and they showed me their photos of their 2015 trip to France. They spent time in Saint-Rémy and the vicinity where Vincent van Gogh stayed for a while when he was in the psychiatric hospital. In the French countryside Vincent created a large portion of his prolific portfolio. Their photographs showed the picturesque places Van Gogh visited and the resulting paintings. I marveled at seeing these iconic sites where Vincent would have sat to draw his inspiration from. He saw: all the greens you can imagine, twisting tree trunks, the village in the distance and even the starry night perhaps. So many of the scenes in real life looked like paintings. All these places where he sat to create the initial drawings or possibly even the real works themselves, have plaques to remind the tourist that the location was immortalized in a painting by the Dutch master. I think Van Gogh had no other choice to but to preserve what he saw for those of us who can appreciate it; the beauty was overwhelming him perhaps.

To think that Van Gogh was able to record so many beautiful scenes in his art, without the use of a digital camera. Nowadays we take so many of our privileges for granted. When Van Gogh was alive, the camera had been around for about twenty to thirty years; owning one was perhaps completely out of the question for most people. The digital camera and various software applications have opened so many possibilities for us. We are overwhelmed too, I think.

I wonder what Van Gogh would have done if he had been confronted with life in a contemporary fast-paced city? I stayed in the Venice of China for a year and I battled to integrate these fleeting impressions of fast-moving buses, trains and hordes of people on electric scooters. The impressions which flooded my consciousness were mostly man-made realities and not the rolling hills of the French country side. I did not have the luxury of time on my side, the way Vincent van Gogh appear to have had. I was teaching (like many other art teachers) and I tried to consolidate my experience by creating “easy” collages to help myself to acknowledge what I had been through or what I have seen – as I have mentioned in an earlier post too.

I wonder what this important post-impressionist, the forerunner or “father” of expressionism would have thought of my attempts (or the attempts of any contemporary artist for that matter) to reflect the “crazy” busyness of city life? As you can see, we enjoy so many privileges Van Gogh could only have dreamt of, for example, we can use: a camera, a computer, a photocopy machine, bling-bling peel-off fake pearls and ready-to-use décor stickers. The truth that we cannot flee from is: the world that surrounds us, will eventually be exposed in our art. Have a great day and may you discover fantastic new ways to portray your world with the help of the devices we have at our disposal.