LANSDOWNE DUTCH TREAT
Exhibit makes it easy to get into Van Gogh
Mathieu St-Arnaud, the creative director behind the immersive Beyond Van Gogh exhibit, is seeing things a little differently after looking at the world through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh.
“He really saw his work as bringing something beautiful to people in their daily lives, and that's something that speaks to me,” St-Arnaud said at a sneak preview of the travelling exhibit Thursday night.
“I find I start to look at the world a bit differently,” St-Arnaud said. “It happened to me this afternoon, I was just sitting outside and there were some kids playing in the sunshine, and I thought to myself, `He could have painted this scene.' And so I sat there for 45 minutes, just taking it all in, enjoying the scenery and the sounds. Just seeing the world a bit differently and taking the time to actually look at it.
“And I think, in this pandemic, that's a good lesson for us: to see beauty where it is. We cannot necessarily travel and try to find beauty and happiness elsewhere, we have to find it around us.
“And it's there, you just have to look.”
Even novice art lovers know the mythology of Van Gogh, but for this immersive experience, St-Arnaud wanted to draw the audience in, to see the world as Van Gogh may have seen it, reflected through each detailed brush stroke of his masterworks.
“I want to go beyond the mythology of Van Gogh, and I wanted to meet Vincent,” St-Arnaud said. “So let's go beyond the frame, and go beyond the archetype of the tortured artist — the ear-cutting and all of his problems through his life — and let's focus on his art and the body of work that he left us.
“For him, art was a healing process, and whatever curveball life threw at him, he would just put on more colour,” he said.
“We wanted people to connect, to see from that different perspective — going beyond what we all know of Van Gogh.
“He left us with these magnificent paintings, and he had the ability to see beauty in the simple life. He would paint the things around him, like his shoes, and it's a masterpiece. He would see beauty in the fields and in the workers, in the postman, his doctor. He saw beauty where it was, all around him.”
St-Arnaud and his team of illustrators and animators from Montreal's renowned Normal Studio have brought more than 300 of Van Gogh's iconic masterworks to life in a three-dimensional space, where the paintings have been “freed from their frames” as the images blend into one another and flow across multiple surfaces.
Mark Monahan, the event's executive director, said the recent move to Step 3 of the provincial reopening plan allowed organizers to launch the event earlier than first scheduled.
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience presented by RBC will be in Ottawa for a limited time, beginning Friday, with tickets available from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week.
“Providing an earlier opening will help satisfy the enthusiasm for tickets that we've been seeing since they first went on sale,” Monahan said.
St-Arnaud said demand for the show has grown with the buzz since opening in Miami, where the show premièred on April 15.
“Since then, we've been to Austin, Milwaukee, Anaheim, San Jose, Honolulu. … It's been crazy, the demand, and it's just been multiplying as we go,” he said. “We want to bring it to as many people as possible.”