Yesterday my son and the woman I love and I went to the Clark Museum to see the “Van Gogh and Nature” exhibit that is there for a limited amount of time. We have been planning to go for months, waiting until my son moved up to take it in.

If you haven’t been to The Clark, it’s a wonderful place. Recently re-opened, they have a fine collection of classical art that is always worth a visit. We spent some time with some old favorites that never gold old, like Renoir….

Monet…

This glorious piano, a piece of art as much as a musical instrument….

Rodin….

and so many others…

But the star of the day was Van Gogh. This was a huge exhibit, and it took you through his development as an artist, from some of his earliest works, which you’d never recognize as his, to the time where he began to find his own visual “voice”, to his last few years, when his work was the magnificent work we think of when we think of him.

They would not let you take pictures in the exhibit itself, but they did have a photo-realistic mural outside that did a great job capturing the details of his brushwork. And it that brushwork and his use of color that grabs you. How he manages to create that sense of motion with his broad, sometimes even crude brushwork is part of his genius. And in painting after painting, I would gaze at the tiny details just as much as the paintings as a whole.

The mural gave you a sense of that brushwork, and it was the details that captured me.

Each section, each group of details was a piece of art in itself.

After we visited the exhibit, we were deftly moved into the gift shop, full of prints, books and other things imprinted with the paintings we had seen. My son had his eye on a print of a painting that had made a particular impression on him. The prints were of good quality, but he said it best: “They just aren’t the same. They lack the life.”

They do indeed. Which is why we go see art in person. To find the life we can find nowhere else.

Tom