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A Canadian expatriate living and exploring first France now Germany, then BACK to FRANCE (!!!) with her family; former fashion designer, turned unexpected UNLIKELY NOMAD, raising two children, writing, photographing, painting, playing piano (who knew!!) and blogging - and now... full time student at ART SCHOOL!! (I MUST be crazy!!)

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Beyond Amazing...

...I have been spending every night, AND ever single moment that I have with VINCENT...I can't stop thinking about him...and shhh... TBG does not even mind, (He is pretty open about things like that) ... You can too, if you check him out here...

As soon as I found out a few weeks ago that almost all of the letters written by Vincent Van Gogh to his utterly devoted younger brother Theo had been preserved and were available to read, I could think of little else. Three volumes of intimate letters full of the detail of his life and the development of his artistic talent from nothing to the genius of his later years, a collection of letters guarded and treasured by his family and left unpublished until his fame was established and his life and work better understood, a collection of letters spanning 13 years or so and covering his travels all over Europe, what a treasure.

Can you tell I am feeling a little obsessed?

Not only is his story a good and particularly interesting one, but as social commentary of the day, it is also of particular interest to me as the chronicle of a developing artist. In the beinning Van Gogh is essentially is self taught and he speaks at length about the deveolpment of his ideas and his techniques ...so far it has been amazing and I must confess I am having difficulty putting it down... (I am sure you are all yawning by now...)

The Van Gogh Museum itself was beyond fabulous, with over 200 original works it was even better than I could have ever expected... the paintings are larger than life and there are no words to describe the beauty of the colors in their luminescence.

It was heaven, the kids, having read all of our books together, were completely aware of what we were looking at and were reverent (well almost reverent...LOL), and spent about an hour drawing while we were there...they are SO cool those two kids...

Here are some of my favorites ...



*Sigh*...Are they not just gorgeous? (Feeling SO inspired...)

*I want to paint JUST like that...*

You can check out more of his work here...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

His paintings are gorgeous! I love his work and would love to get to that museum. It sounds great!

BTW - your kids ARE so cool!

oreneta said...

I'm going to feed your obsession. There is somewhere a book of letters published written by Vincent and Gauguin to each other. Now I am ALL hot to read those as well....can you imagine? Those two! Discussing their art! With each other!!!!

*held breath*

Gotta get my hands on it one day.

Gary said...

Go girl go!

Yes, Vincent left so much. Sometimes it's wonderful to be obsessed by something and soak it up.

What we have been up to...