The absolute highlight of my year so far — and I’m not exaggerating here — has been a visit to the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy, which completely and utterly blew me away. The bringing together of the paintings glistening in the shadowy galleries, and his letters written in ordinary, faded old brown ink is a stroke of inspiration worthy of the man himself. To read about his struggles to master perspective and then straight away to see a series of pictures in which he gets to grip with the technique is an education not just in the creative process, but in the rollercoaster ride of human endeavour, with its triumphs and its disappointments.
That’s what I love about Van Gogh : he wears his heart on his sleeve, both in his correspondence and in his art, which is so freighted with emotion and yearning that the images are both painful and elating to behold; an extraordinary blend of vividness and vulnerability.
One of the most touching things about the visit was the number of children who were there. It was lovely to stand looking at a painting next to a dad with his six-year-old clamped to his hip, and hear him explain about what they were looking at and about Van Gogh and what he was trying to achieve and how difficult it was for him. It made me realise that there is a kind of childlike quality to his work, it speaks directly to the observer without guile, so that even the very young can find something to wonder at in what Mervyn Peake described as “…twisted canvases of quenchless fire.”
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