A visit with Van Gogh

Friday afternoon Joan and I go out on our own and use the local transit (think light rail done properly) to visit the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh is Joan's favorite artist and when she was here in 71/72 the paintings were at different museums. So we really wanted to see the greatest single collection of his work in this dedicated Museum.

The tram stop for Van Gogh is at the Rijksmuseum so we first took a look around there and the free gardens.

Van Gogh was a complex and crazed man who was quite proliferic. His entire painting career was only 10 years long but it is amazing the number of paintings he produced. The collection here represents his work from his early failures through his magnificent Potatoe Eaters and finally his Sunflowers and Iris canvas. You can see him struggle to become an artist of his generation. To fight conforming to the stylism of his contemporaries. Finding new ways of expressing the emotion of a painting through the use of time, color, and brush stroke. The subtlety of whats contained  in the background. He had a hard life and no one believed in him until his death with the exception of theo, his brother. His recognition did not begin until the year that he died and never sold a single painting while he was still living.

The most amazing thing was to look at his paintings under a microscope. They are alive with movement, swirls, waves of color rising up to only crash down and mix with yet another color. The museum was definitely a highlight of this trip. 

Oh yeah, the Power Failure was indeed true. It impacted all of Northern Holland for about three hours including Schiphol Airport and all the train service. We passed through Amsterdam Central several times and the train schedules were all screwed up with people hanging out everywhere. Rain was off and on and we have yet to see the sun. We shall hope for fair weather tonight and a canal/dinner cruise tonight.