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Van Gogh travels so learn to paint on holiday

12th September 202412th September 2024 funtime65

When the world’s most famous artist comes to town you start to regret not sticking in at art class, but, here, Van Gogh travels so learn to paint on holiday.

You might instantly think that the Netherlands would be your first port of call.

And we have found a hotel where you can learn the secrets of Rembrandt.

The very same establishment, the 5* Pulitzer Hotel, which fellow travellers have advised has turned guests into budding Vincents.

Artugal for inner Vincents

Luxury Travel Advisor, well, advises us that the Pulitzer introduced a Van Gogh Art Programme a few years back.

So keep your ear to the ground (soz), and we will too, for whether they’re still churning out Van Goghs.

In the meantime we learn that amateur artists are brushing up on their depths of vision in Portugal.

The Hyatt Regency Lisbon is offering its guests a range of art classes.

And you can choose from an Abstract Oil Painting Workshop from £30 per person or Watercolour Landscape Workshop from £25 per person.

And our favourite, of course, Paint like Van Gogh Workshop from £30 per person.

Prices start at £294 per night based on 2 adults sharing a standard room with a queen bed and River View. Price based on October 2024 stay.

A National obsession

Now art need not be forbidding and I venture that it is the most accessible of pastimes.

Free in many museums with the chance to see the world’s foremost painters’ work up close and personal.

And which other discipline can we say that about?

All of which is why there is such excitement at the Van Gogh exhibition Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London.

Which is running from September 14 through to January 19 with tickets on sale now.

And boasting more than 60 of the Dutch geniuses.

With the National Gallery inviting us to get up close to his Starry Night over the Rhône and The Yellow House.

As well as the National’s own Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair, among many others.

All as part of the museum’s 200th birthday celebrations (from £24).

Master the art

Now, if, the National Museum’s exhibition pricks your interest then, of course, you should make a Vincent pilgrimage to Amsterdam.

And immerse yourself in the Van Gogh museum.

And maybe even compare your new-found skills for his genre which you learned out in the Hyatt in Lisbon.

Because, despite what my old art teacher Joe Reilly might have said, back in the day.

There is an artist in all of us.

Van Gogh travels so learn to paint on holiday.

And I give you an original Murty… Mill in Tobago. Priceless!

Countries, Europe, Flying

Van Gogh Museum at 50

3rd June 20233rd June 2023 funtime65

It’s apt that the Dutch are celebrating the Van Gogh Museum at 50 with sunflowers, it’s blooming marvellous.

Flowers are one of the things the Dutch are known for which is why Vincent and his fellow artists are so darned good at them.

I’m thinking my school art teacher Mr Cairney missed a trick with us budding Scottish artists giving us apples to draw.

Although he probably thought the Scottish national flower, the thistle, might not have been the most aesthetic.

Flowers of Amsterdam

Flowers are at the heart of the Dutch story with tulips the must-have status symbol of the 17th century.

The rarest of which was as expensive as a Dutch townhouse.

With the demand in the bulb causing a run which led to the world’s first financial bubble.

All of which you can learn more about at the Tulip Museum in Amsterdam and check out Breughel’s observations.

And how tulips saved the Dutch during the last winter of the Second World War.

Vincent Sun Gogh

Whether Van Gogh was giving in allowing others to paint the Dutch national flower (unlikely) we’ll never know.

But he never painted one tulip in his lifetime although there is one named for him, a reddish-brown one that reaches 50-60cms.

Perhaps though he’d realised that sunflowers were more his thing.

They’re certainly the Dutch Royal Family’s.

With Queen Juliana symbolically presented with a sunflower at the museum’s opening back in 1973.

And Princess Beatrix the same, although a new flower obvs, this week at the Museumplein.

Drone rangers

Earlier in the day, employees distributed tens of thousands of sunflowers, transforming the Museumplein into a sea of flowers.

As a gift to the city of Amsterdam, a drone display took place at 11pm.

The Sunflowers represented generosity to Van Gogh and he painted three in the Yellow House in Arles.

And hung two in the guest room when Paul Gauguin came to stay.

One of which the Frenchman asked if he could have which may have sparked the row which saw Vincent hack his ear off.

Play to the gallery

We’ll never know but we do know he painted two more and we’re just grateful one hangs in the Van Gogh Museum.

Alongside the Potato Eaters, Bedroom in Arles and Almond Blossoms among others, Starry Night is at the MOMA in New York.

The Van Gogh Museum is indeed the gift that keeps on giving as you explore the Pictures of Amsterdam.

So as we celebrate the Van Gogh Museum at 50 we’ll be sure to add again to there 53 million who have already been through its doors.

And we’ll be flying into Schiphol, one of our fave airports, with Dutch airline carrier KLM… check out site for best offers.

And maybe pushing the boat out to stay at George and Amal’s fave Dutch hotel, the Dylan.

Europe

Give activists the Van Gogh brush-off

16th October 20221st November 2022 funtime65

Is nothing sacred, and shouldn’t all who want to construct rather than destruct give activists the Van Gogh brush-off?

Just how Vincent would have reacted to the two climate activists who threw a tin of soup at his oil painting Sunflowers in London is anybody’s guess.

But we suspect that the fiery redhead would have gone mental at the fundamentalists and rightly so.

Thankfully for all, the painting is protected by a shield of glass.

Cultural vandalism

The right fun with flowers: Sunflowers all around

But such is his brilliance that if you get up close and personal to his paintings you can see…

Just how thick oils were which he feverishly applied to his paintings.

My first reaction to the cultural vandalism of their attack was a Van Goghian rage at these activists’ abuse of a civilian’s right to protest.

And how their selective destruction of our art would not have been out of place in the fascist Third Reich or Mussolini’s Italy.

Not that these philistines deserve an answer but Vincent Van Gogh had a love and insight for nature that few of us can reach.

And far fewer still can express.

Some painting notes

Flower power: Vin’s all about the flowers

And here the good people of the National Gallery lend us their expertise with some artistic notes.

The sunflower is mine’, Van Gogh is once said to have declared, and it does speak to him (both metaphorically and perhaps in his delirium).

The different stages in the sunflower’s life cycle shown here, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay, follow in the vanitas tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century flower paintings (who knew?)

And that emphasises the transient nature of human actions.

The sunflowers were perhaps also intended to be a symbol of friendship and a celebration of the beauty and vitality of nature.

And he had five of them on display across the world.

Although lucky chap that he was Paul Gauguin got to see them all after Vincent had painted them for him for his arrival in his house at Arles.

At your attendance

In the picture: And it’s Rembrandt in Amsterdam

Spare a thought and a minute here too for the staff at the National Gallery in London who care for the exhibits better than their own children.

Because these stunts push us further down the road to bulky guards at our art galleries rather than helpful attendants.

And should that come then the essence, the karma of the spaces, the floors and rooms of an art gallery will be compromised.

The best place to appreciate Van Gogh’s art is at his museum in Amsterdam.

And hang with the Bedroom at Arles, The Potato Eaters The Self-Portrait with Grey Fedora, Irises and Wheatfield with a reaper.

There are many great art cities but Amsterdam allows you to be part of the picture as you can see with another Dutch art great Rembrandt and his living Night Watch.

And the best way to get around is at with the IAmsterdam card… and the best place to stay the Dylan Hotel, where George and Amal go.

Play to the gallery

We didn’t see that: No, not in the picture but in one of The Scary One’s pics

A print of which has hung in our spare room across a bunch of houses we have lived in in Britain and Ireland.

Where there have been clumsy removals and teens’ house parties.

But while there have been damages and breakages we have always treated our art and our prints.

Which we all should in our own homes and in our art galleries.

While we give the activists the Van Gogh brush-off.

America, Countries, Culture, Europe, Ireland

Every story tells a picture – from Caravaggio to Van Gogh

31st January 202130th January 2021 funtime65

Surrounded by our four walls in lockdown one of the few ways to transport ourselves to exotic shores is through our pictures.

It is after all what our Vincent did when he struggled for his sanity.

Van Gogh had developed a taste for all things Polynesian from housemate Paul Gaugin.

Van Gogh also had his demons to exorcise too, particularly when incarcerated.

And he would explore such existential themes in his art as the Reaper himself.

Now I’m not saying that I obsess on the same even during lockdown.

But a print of his Wheatfield with a Reaper hangs proudly in our guest room, hopefully not spooking out our visitors (when they come).

Can I be trusted on a bike? In Amsterdam

But reminding us of the captivating Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on our tour of Amsterdam.

All of which meanderings has prompted me to share some of the finer art I’ve enjoyed on my travels.

Beheading for Malta

Lose your head: Caravaggio in Valletta. www.caravaggio.org

Beheading of St John the Baptist, Caravaggio, Valletta: There’s always something a bit unhinged about artists.

And the meeting of brushmeister and subject comes together in this classic painting, described as ‘the painting of the 17th century.’

Caravaggio was on the run and took refuge with the Knights of Malta in Malta.

But he fell out with them, was imprisoned and then escaped from their dungeons.

A theory floated in 2010 has it that Michelangelo Merisi, for it is he, was killed by poisonous paints.

And suspicious has since fallen on the Knights.

Caravaggio’s masterpiece hangs in St John’s Co-Cathedral and shows real insight into the shady side of life.

Valletta with its stunning harbour is a real jewel.

And and you can picture the intrigue and the underworld of Medieval Mediterranean life.

When we’re all able to get out again then Malta should be on your radar.

Monster Munch in Bergen

The Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen: And you’ll gasp at what those naughty trolls are doing in the drawings in this gallery.

Up a fjord in mystic, fabled Norway you’ll find this artistic curio.

It wouldn’t be a Norwegian gallery without a host of Edvard Munches and Bergen doesn’t disappoint.

And the story notes give you a real insight into the travails of the Great Man.

Bergen is also the place for the travels of JS Dahl whose paintings first popularised cruising in the fjords

A must visit on your MSC Cruises stop-off while, of course, you simply have to pull a Munch Scream pose.

Paint the ceiling in Padua

Scrovegni Chapel, Padua: And it’s doubtful you would have a fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without a Scrovegni Chapel.

Well, you probably would, but it might have been the Medieval version of Dulux!

Giotto was something of an inspiration for Michelangelo and you can see his halo work here.

And yes we know the finesse of Firenze, the merits of Milan, the riches of Rome and my own recent favourite, beautiful Bergamo.

But Padua, often in the shadow of Venice, should be praised to the heavens which in fairness to Giotto he does.

Masters and Mississippi

The settlers: The Mississippi Art Museum

Museum of Mississippi Art, Jackson, Mississippi: Yes, when we think art and America we immediately focus on MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York Art, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

The First Nation: In the Mississippi Art Museum

But in truth America is a sweep of wonderful art, so take it in wherever you find it.

Which in Jackson, Mississippi is the Museum of Mississippi Art where you’ll see early Frontier art and much more.

Dirty old Lane

Art for arts sake: The Francis Bacon Studio

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin: And it’s the Francis Bacon studio you want to see here.

Bacon bequeathed his studio to his home city on the understanding that it would be recreated in every detail.

All of which means it is messier than any student bedsit…

To think I was probably sitting on a goldmine back in Aberdeen in the Eighties.

America, Countries, Culture, Europe, Ireland, UK

Go! Monopoly around the world

10th December 202010th December 2020 funtime65

We may never know why Vincent Van Gogh lost his ear, though here is a fine crime fiction on the subject, but who is to say it wasn’t after a row about Monopoly?

Our pals at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are the latest to join the Monopoly club.

With the release of their own Vincent board game for Christmas.

Becoming one of hundreds of Monopolys around the world.

With at the latest count, the game being licensed in 103 countries and printed in more than 37 languages.

The Van Gogh version substitutes the Great Man’s art for the traditional streets.

Just painting

While among the pieces naturally is a paint tube though perhaps tastefully no ear.

Monopoly for most of us is as much part of Christmas as Santa, who often brought it fir our stockings, and Christmas turkey.

But it was also brought out when friends came over, or relatives, from home or abroad.

And this was when it got really exciting to see the names of their streets and public transport.

O’Monopoly

So when my Irish relatives got their Dublin board out it had such names as O’Connell Street, Shrewsbury Street in Ballsbridge where I got to stay, and the Busaras on it.

It was very much a point of honour that your country had its own Monopoly.

It was a sign that you were not under the English yolk.

Although when you did get down to London when you were older you didn’t feel such a tourist as you ambled along the Strand, Pall Mall and Fleet Street.

Big Appley

Most spectacular of all was the New York edition where you could say you owned Broadway.

All us poor Scots had to dream of was buying Mayfair, Park Lane or Old Kent Road.

Until the manufacturers stumbled on the rather obvious idea of giving us all what we wanted.

McNopoly

And so we got Edinburgh, and the Royal Mile, Princes Street, the two football stadiums, Easter Road and Tynecastle Park and the rugby ground, Murrayfield.

Now, of course there are now football clubs, film and TV franchises Monopoly merchandise.

D’Ohpoly

In fact you name it and Monopoly have probably adapted it to your needs.

And so I have in my attic a Royal Caribbean cruise game as well as a Simpsons game.

From my travels in Europe and in Orlando.

Of course Monopoly, while having a deeply suspicious Property speculation message in its origins back in 1935, has really become a vehicle for imagination.

And discovering about foreign destinations…

By plane, ship, car… or my personal favourite, a wee Scottie dog.