We have both been captured by the personal and expressive paintings that are the hallmark of Van Gogh’s style. When I was fortunate enough to have six hours in Amsterdam on my way to Malawi to serve with the Canadian Teacher’s Federation, I used the time to go to the wondrous Van Gogh Museum which is on the edge of the aptly named Museumplein.

There are a number of his paintings at the National Gallery in London that we stop to look at each time we go, including his famous “Sunflowers.”  So when the Van Gogh Immersive Experience came to London, we made a note of its location and cost and this week took the time to go into town and enjoy the show.

The exhibition hall was located in Shoreditch on a commercial street between Liverpool Station and Brick Road, the kind of district you don’t want to be walking around in anytime past midnight. It was not all that easy to find, and there isn’t much in the way of decent places to eat nearby, so if you go, you might want to eat in a nicer part of town first. We didn’t, thinking we’d find somewhere local, and went hungry as a result.

There had been a recent flare up of a local COVID variant in the weeks leading up to the event, so a number of participants were masked up in preparation. The crowds were also thin as a result, so we had no trouble finding a comfortable place to sit to watch the panoply of paintings moving across the exhibition walls in time with synthetic sounds intended to convey the varying moods of the portraits and landscapes.

I confess it was a little disorientating sitting in the midst of paintings in 360 degrees around your head. I am more used to seeing static art that allows you time to reflect and examine the work. This was something else, and whether it was more show than art I will leave for others more qualified than myself to say. I will say that I found the experience insightful.

To be immersed in the moods and brushstrokes of Van Gogh is to lose the sense of detachment that one usually has in an art gallery. Instead, you were captured by the overwhelming fluidity and adventure of an art that so shattered the norms of even that most experimental time that during his lifetime Van Gogh was only able to sell one painting. Now $100 million would likely not be enough.

There was more than a touch of sadness to that reflection. Beauty and gentle genius are so often lost in a culture that seems to only value commercial and financial success. The brash and the brazen succeed on the basis of bravado alone, while the sincere and studious are scorned as losers and failures. It is a terrible commentary on the shallowness of our culture.

Tragically Van Gogh took his own life in 1890 and never lived long enough to reap the rewards of his talents. In the two years before his death, he produced nearly 300 paintings and hundreds of drawings and sketches. It is an astounding output and mute testimony to the creative genius that was Van Gogh.

February 2022