Today I’ll be reminiscing on my visit to ‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ which was hosted in St Mary’s Church, York. This follows on from two previous posts about my York visit earlier this year – firstly, my York Sketches post and secondly, my Monet in York post. There was so much to see and take in at York that I haven’t felt I could do it justice in one post!
Introduction
Like the Monet in York exhibition, ‘The Immersive Experience’ was amazing. To the point where I want all venues everywhere to be converted into an immersive art experience.
Let me explain…
The venue
Other than a bit of external Van Gogh branding, St Mary’s Church appears to be your average small-medium sized UK church building. Understated and with historical charm. Incongruously placed amongst modern shops as is typical of York’s mix of old and new, and therefore not actually out of place.
Inside, a labyrinth of partitions creates a small box office, main venue space, gallery space and a gift shop. Kind of mirroring that York tessellation of ‘old and new’. At times, you forget you’re in a church.
Off the main venue space was a side room that had been staged based on Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings (of which there are three). This was so realistically done that you almost felt like you could be in the actual bedroom. It was a bit surreal.
This is my version of Bedroom in Arles after Van Gogh, done in acrylics:
The Immersive Experience
The idea is that you are essentially surrounded by art and sound. There are deck chairs and benches to sit on. And the whole of the exhibition space is floodlit with projections of Van Gogh’s art.
The art projections and soundscape are on a loop. From what I remember it was about 30-40 minutes on repeat. Paintings come to life around you, portraits move, trees sway. The soundscape is soothing and evocative music, interspersed with Van Gogh quotes. One of my favourite quotes that stayed with me was this: “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
The whole vibe was so chilled and inspiring… I might have stayed for twice my allocated time slot… shh!
Everywhere should be an art immersive experience. It made me want to recreate it at home. Like, dedicate an entire room to projections of moving art, in subdued lighting, with inspiring chillout music in the background. But for lots of different artists and artworks. If only there was some way of recreating it!
Small but powerful gallery space
I could have stayed in the immersive experience all day. But there was more to see.
When you leave the main venue space, you go through a mini gallery/museum space.
The theme of the immersive experience is continued because the artworks on display are illuminated with backlighting. It looked really inviting, and intensified the already vibrant colours of Van Gogh’s paintings.
There are the normal museum-type boards of text where I learnt that, like Monet, Vincent Van Gogh was inspired by the Japanese woodblock prints that had been popular in Paris at the time. This had been a revelation to me, perhaps even “discovery of the weekend”.
Thie influence of the Japanese prints is very apparent in his Portrait of Père Tanguy painting. He also puts Japanese prints on the walls in the backgrounds of his paintings, see his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and even the ‘Bedroom in Arles’ paintings where at least two of the wall paintings are likely to be Japanese prints.
It was useful from a contextual point of view that I had been in a room full of these prints the day before at the Monet in York exhibition at the York Art Gallery. I was glad I had done it in this order, pure luck though.
Japanese woodblock prints
By this point, my curiosity about these woodblock prints was sparked. Two names kept coming up: Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.
Hokusai’s best known woodblock prints are in the series titled “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”. Hiroshige was influenced by Hokusai’s series and is best known for “The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō” and “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”. The former is a series of horizontal-format landscapes and the latter are vertical-format landscapes. The genre of Japanese art that they contributed to is called ‘ukiyo-e’, which the internet tells me translates roughly to “pictures of the floating world”. How lovely.
I like these prints, but I’m not exactly sure why I’m drawn to them. They aren’t indicative of my typical taste for vibrant colours, textures and movement. Having said that, there is just something about them that is strangely captivating. And I suppose they do appeal to the part of me which appreciates illustrations, cartoons, and graphic novels.
Not that I’m saying they fit into any of these categories. I guess I’m just curious about the link between these prints and Impressionist France.
Japanese woodblock prints
What next? Well, I had to try creating something similar, didn’t I? I’m not talking about carving actual woodblocks to print with… I lack the time and, more importantly, the skill! But I felt that I could try something in watercolour and pen, with which I’m much more familiar!
And I used a couple of photos from a recent day out as inspiration:
What do you think?
I’ve used my Royal Talens Van Gogh watercolours and a 0.1mm Uni Pin Fineliner. Materials I am used to working with, in a style I am very much not. However, it was very relaxing!
As a side point, I realised that this is definitely a way of creating art that is suited to mindfulness practice (see my mindfulness art blogs).
I haven’t quite managed to achieve the deep, inky tones seen in the Hokusai or Hiroshige prints. But I’ve tried to match the colours as best as I could. And I did have a lot of fun, and will probably have another go in the future.
I’ve come to realise the value in trying to recreate art in all different styles – even styles that aren’t obviously correlated with what you naturally resonate with. I think it’s useful for developing a better understanding of another artist’s motivation, and ultimately enriches one’s own style.
Bringing it back to Vincent
One thing I can’t miss from this account of ‘The Immersive Experience’ is the virtual reality area that you can choose to partake in before leaving (via the gift shop, of course!).
Now, normally these VR headsets make my eyes water and cause me to feel nauseous*, but not this one. In fact, I wanted to do it again! And now I want to experience virtual reality of all the impressionist artists, in the same kind of way!
*I still chose to do it, of course – I didn’t want to miss out…
Basically, you put the virtual reality headset on and you get to ‘walk through’ Vincent’s paintings, recreated in a virtual world.
So you walk through the street (as in Café Terrace at Night), then through the bar (as in The Night Café), out into the wheat fields (as in Wheat Stacks in Provence), and through many other scenes from his paintings. It was amazing.
It’s exactly the reason I paint the way I do – because I want that to be what the world looks like. I want to live inside an impressionist painting!
A little Van Gogh inspired painting
In summary, my York trip served to intensify an already feverish obsession with impressionism. And I left feeling inspired and full of creative ideas. For example, this small painting which has resulted in me discovering a new way to do mindfulness art. Paint over the top of a printed photograph, it’s a bit like painting by numbers:
This is the original photo:
If it was even remotely practical (and also not completely destructive), I would crack on and paint over everything in the world. But let’s be real… it would be expensive, it would take far too long and it would render useful things useless.
And I understand that (!).
So I’ll have to stick to painting over photographs of things in the world. I can see me using a similar ‘painting over’ technique for my mixed media artwork. It’s the closest I’ll get to satisfying my desire to live in a painting.
On a different note, I really like the subdued colours in my Vincent-inspired painting. The trees and sky remind me of the cypress trees in various Van Gogh paintings. I mixed a beige/ochre into all the colours I used to achieve this ‘subdued’ feel. And it led to an aesthetically pleasing paint palette too:
Maybe I should plan another ‘art culture trip’ for next year, and see what creative ideas come out of it!
Stillness amongst chaos
It’s no secret that Vincent Van Gogh experienced much emotional turmoil in his short lifetime. But we can be grateful that he expressed himself through his paintings.
So when it feels like the world has gone a bit mad, let us find stillness amongst the chaos and use the power of art and creativity to provide an escape.
Remember to make time to look after yourself and stay really safe. Like really, really safe.