Wake me up before you Gogh Gogh

I had a Saturday off so decided to go a-wandering in the National gallery. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an art gallery. I think the last one I was in was the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the only thing I can remember were the huge chandeliers which the tour guides were supposedly told not to let their tour groups stand under ‘just in case’. I’m a big fan of the Natural History Museum; I’ve been about five times in the last year and a half but have never got along with art museums. Probably because I was dragged around them as a child in a vain attempt to make me ‘cultured’. I don’t care what anyone says, you can’t inject culture into a twelve year old. But, I have since developed a penchant for learning and thought a little trip to an education centre might be in order.

I was pleasantly surprised. A little like shopping, I feel you only really reap the benefits if you go on your own; you don’t have to wait for someone else to go looking at a piece you’re frankly not interested in. Also you really can’t appreciate these paintings until you’ve seen them in the flesh (so to speak). A postcard really doesn’t do them justice.

However, I have to say some artists are remarkably bad at painting. Van Gogh in particular really annoyed me. Call me a philistine but I really don’t get the attraction. The painting of his room looks like a twelve year old drew it. The perspective’s all screwy and as a comic artist this disturbs me greatly. I can understand that it’s ‘impressionist’ and supposed to look crappy but still. The sunflowers don’t look like sunflowers. They don’t even look like an impressionist idea of sunflowers. They look like dead daffodils.

See what I mean?

I realised I was being a little narrow-minded so I decided to do a little reading into it to see if he really was the talentless hack I had him painted as (pun, as always, intended). Again, I was pleasantly surprised. Some of his art is actually quite beautiful and it makes me wonder why it’s the rubbish ones that are remembered. Here are some of my favourites:

Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889

And it turns out he’s not rubbish at perspective:

A view from his room in The Hague

Vincent Van Gogh could have given Edvard Munch a run for his money in the gloomies though. His last words were ‘the sadness will last forever’, whether in regards to his own death (a little presumptuous) or in reference to his own sadness; I’m not sure. He definitely had a serious bout of the crazies which culminated when he stalked his friend Paul Gauguin with a razor. Gauguin, the fair weather friend, then deserted him. Shortly after, Van Gogh cut off the lower part of his ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel asking her to “keep this object carefully” (Obviously in the days before Milk Tray). In 1890 he walked into a field and shot himself in the chest which, for some reason, he didn’t think was fatal (durgh) and died two days later. It was believed his brother died a short while later ‘because he was not able to come to terms with the absence of his Vincent’. It was later revealed by his family that he actually died of syphilis. Not quite as poetic.

And if anyone sends me a message saying ‘Gogh’ is actually pronounced ‘Gogh as in Loch’ and not ‘Gogh as in flow’ they will suffer my wrath.