[bane]

My wife and I both struggled to really get into his work until we went to the museum. There's something about the way the museum presented Van Gogh, as a struggling misfit of perhaps questionable talent trying to make friends and looking for a popular counter-culture style, that really clicked with me. I didn't identify with Van Gogh per se, but I suddenly felt for him and his humanity and it peeled away those layers of nonsensical pop-culture that surrounds him.

I think also that I had seen very few of his paintings in person and when you see his late works, after he figured out what he was, they explode off the canvas like nothing I've ever seen before. My wife and I went home and bought a reproduction we were so moved, and then promptly decided not to hang it when it arrived as it lacks that....whatever factor it is in his real works that make them shimmer like something from another plane of spacetime.

I really recommend people who don't like van Gogh to visit that museum.

[borbulon]

I could spend days in front of just one of his real works.

[runamok]

The texture of his paintings is impossible to reproduce in a print. He really slathered it on!