Sunday in the Paintings with Ed

Written 5-6-2018

We finally saw something we’ve been wanting to see for a while, the movie Loving Vincent.

The story depicts, in oil painted animation, a young man who visits the last hometown of painter Vincent van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist’s final letter and ends up investigating the artist’s final days.

Visually playful experience!

There is a classic interview question, “If you could spend a day with anyone alive or dead, who would it be, and why?”

Of course, my list of candidates is always growing: Paul Newman, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Dorothea Lange, Dan Marino, Chuck Yeager, Faye Dunaway, Nikos Kazantzakis to just name a few. Listing the ‘whys’ here would take too long.

However, until I saw Loving Vincent, it didn’t occur to me to spend a day in a painting painted as a cast member so I could converse with the other characters there, talking about the back-story about the genesis of the painting.

So, today, I’m on a field trip inside some favorite paintings that Sharon and I have already seen on our adventures:

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Goldfish by Henri Matisse at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Ruscsia.
La gare Saint-Lazare by Claude Monet at The Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The Adoration of the Trinity by Landauer Altar at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh at the The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

This is today’s short adventure. I’ll have to think of some other paintings we’ve seen to revisit this way.

If you could spend a day inside a painting, which painting would it be? Who do you want to hang with?

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte