Experiencing Joy Through Art

   Good day to you! I hope you are having a wonderful morning. It’s another beautiful clear sunny day here. I hope it is where you are too. On the evening of Tuesday April, 14th, I went to a Fathom event at my local theater that was a movie about the life and art of Van Gogh…

   If you are not familiar with Fathom, they broadcast live events in theaters across the country…Often they show operas or ballets, giving people who live far away from cities to see those shows live at their local movie theater. It’s a great idea. Recently thay have begun doing a series of art/museum tours and documentaries about different artists. This most recent one on Tuesday was all about Vincent Van Gogh.

   Filmed partially at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, it was a fascinating look into the artist’s life and work. So often when artists from history become well known like that, we as humans tend to canonize them and think of them as these wise and deep geniuses who had a great vision. Seeing films like this helps reacquaint us with the real man and to remember that Van Gogh was a living, breathing person same as you and I, who had no idea that someday his work would be worth millions. Who had daily struggles to contend with and doubted his own abilities. 

“Self Portrait” • Oil on Pasteboard • 1887

  The producers who made the film found an actor who looked very like the self portraits that Van Gogh painted and that helped make him seem more “real”. Van Gogh struggled with depression and other mental issues that I’ve heard some modern experts say shows evidence of him being Bi-Polar. A condition that would have been treatable in today’s world. He spent time in a couple of mental hospitals during his life but continued to work despite his troubles.

   I was interested to learn that at a young age Van Gogh wanted to become a preacher but eventually gave up the call to a religious career for art instead. He and his brother worked at an art gallery for a time so he was already knowledgable about the art world. He was an artist for only 10 years before dying at the young age of 37, but in that time he produced over 2,100 artworks…his Protestant work ethic driving him to avoid “laziness”.

   We are blessed to have most of the intimate letters he wrote to his brother Theo. In them he talks about his dreams and fears and what his work meant to him. My only criticism of the film was I felt there could have been more about the art itself. They spent the majority of the movie on Van Gogh’s personal thoughts and life history which was fascinating, but I wish they had showed more paintings and talked more about the technical aspect of how he worked. I would have liked to known what colors he used, what brand of paint he liked, where did he buy his canvases?

“Sunflowers” • Oil on Canvas • 1888

   There was some discussions of how his art and style changed in his short career, and his methods of working but not enough of it. I would have liked to have seen more art and fewer old photographs of Paris from the 1880s. In “Sunflowers”, one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, the sunny yellow blossoms have darkened over the years to a muddy yellow ochre color because of his use of Chrome Yellow…a color we now know to be fugitive. Yet there was no mention of that type of thing in the film.

   All in all it was a wonderful look into the artist’s life and I really enjoyed it! There are two more events coming up in that series later in the spring and summer. One on Vermeer and the other on the Impressionists. I am looking forward to those!