Art and Travel
Waiting in the Rain — for Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Monet.
While we bantered about Easter Eggs and how to get a grant.
It was a long wait to get into see the fabulous “Masterpieces From Paris” exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
The minute I knew they were being shown, I told my Mum and Dad that I was off to Canberra to see them. The chance to see originals by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, and others was something not to be missed, because Canberra was so much closer to Perth than was Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the exhibition was closing in early April 2010.
I have had a long and abiding love of Van Gogh, especially since hearing Don McLean’s song “Starry, Starry Night”. There is a link to a wonderful video of Van Gogh paintings, and the song. Here it is:
Working like crazy to make time away from work and my home. On a whim.
From very early the Sunday morning before I left, I worked to update emails, prepare blogs, and generally prepare for my trip. I caught the “red eye” out of Perth at 11:00pm the same Sunday night, with Jetstar.
I do things like that often. Decide to go — get online, book travel, hotels, and tours. It’s what some Nanas can do — just get up and go.
I had booked my flights online, direct with Qantas, and had never flown with Jetstar before. I queued for 1 and 1/2 hrs to be checked in. No Qantas club or Frequent Flyer benefits Jetstar. You pay for everything on the flight, even water.
We chatted all the way to Sydney: Lili and I. Sitting together with her daughter, Lili was a hypnotherapist — returning to Sydney after her brief visit to Perth to work helping in a jewellery auction. There was a quick change of planes in Sydney to get to Canberra — one hr between flights and luggage to be collected. Thank God for Qantas Club where breakfast was coffee and two slices of toast.
Meeting up with a fellow traveller — and not getting it right.
In Canberra, I shared a taxi to my hotel; dropped off my bag and stood under a tree in the rain (no umbrella or raincoat) until the bus came. Val, an older woman from Melbourne, who had a prepaid ticket, joined me. We arrived at the National Art Gallery just before 10:30am Monday, which was 7:30am Perth time and I had had no sleep for over 24 hrs.
After 15 minutes in the queue, I was directed to go and buy my ticket. Everyone had to have a prepaid ticket to get in.
25 minutes later, I was back to the end of the (even longer) queue, to start again. I had lost my spot because I had no one to save my place. Val had gone wandering off to the National Portrait Gallery, because she walked with a cane and finds standing in a queue very difficult.
We had intermittent showers, no wind, it was not too cold, and I fell in with some West Australians, so all had a good and funny time while we waited.
Australians have a great sense of humour and are happy to make the best of any situation. You could get a newspaper to read, while you waited, and funny bits of news were read aloud, and discussed with great mirth.
Keeping ourselves amused — with our unique Australian humour.
One especially funny story was about a post-graduate who was given a grant to find out how many Easter eggs does a child have to get, to place a higher value on the chocolate as having come from the Easter Bunny rather than from the shop.
The Graduate’s conclusion was six Easter eggs or more, but another grant is being sought for further research that is more definitive.
We all laughed long and hard about that one. You didn’t need to have a post-grad qualification to guess the reason for seeking another grant.
We had all had similar travel experiences in NZ and the USA, so there was a lot to talk about while we waited.
The children in the queue were very well behaved, with plenty of room to run about on the open plaza leading into the Gallery and their parents or grandparents were making regular food runs to keep them busy.
Just before we got to the last stage, Val found me, and it was as I suspected. Even with her pre-purchased ticket, she couldn’t go to the head of the queue as she had been told when she bought her ticket/ accommodation package. We let her into the queue with us, since she and I had come to the Gallery together.
Twittering our progress as we went.
I kept updating on Twitter as we inched our way forward towards the Gallery and even once inside the main door, we still had another half an hour to wait. By now, I had been in the queue for just over three hours and a half hours and without sleep for almost 30 hrs.
Was the wait going to be worth it? What do you think?
It was almost surreal to enter the “Masterpieces From Paris” exhibition, after being without sleep for almost 30 hrs, and I picked up my headset for the recorded commentary just before I entered the first room.
Altogether, there were six rooms of art and an open viewing area, too. The first painting simply took my breath away.
In the Salon style, larger than life size was a beautiful woman in a gown painted from a palette that was both luminous and new. Bresnard’s Madame Roger Jourdain was, in his own time, a standout hit in the 1886 Salon. Adjoining were Sargent’s La Carmencita and Henri Gervex’ Madame Valtesse, both rich with colour, depth and presence. These are great works of art.
Claude Monet painted on a grand scale. From the 1860’s to 1886, Monet almost abandoned figure painting in favour of his landscapes — and the iconic In the Norwegian, of three young women fishing upon a tranquil stream was one of his renewed love of painting women.
Monet had great financial success in 1886 and he was able to buy the house in which he lived. He later said of himself: “Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing.” He built the famous waterlily pond and its Japanese bridge himself, and he painted them eighteen times.
Alongside the Monet hung Degas’ ballet dancers, Sisley’s Moret Bridge and Pissarro’s Pont Boieldieu with its smoke and mist of the morning contrasting with the solid brick towers and arches of the bridge.
The Neo-Impressionism room, I personally found less attractive than the earlier works I had seen, and I did not linger long amongst the Pissarro, Seurat, and Signac.
As I moved through the exhibition, a new era unfolded. Picasso, Gauguin, and Cezanne still life paintings were exquisite. Strong, vibrant works with respect for their subjects.
Cezanne spoke of the fruit thus: “They come to you with all their aromas and tell you about the fields that they left, about the rains that nourished them, about the dawns they watched”.
A huge painting by Maurice Denis pays tribute to Cezanne and their whole school and in particular, I liked Vollard’s cat seen between the men’s legs. The picture is rather dark, but you can see the cat’s eyes, if you look very closely.
Van Gogh — the reason I had come.
I arrived in the next room. This was the reason I had come.
In London, I had stood, inspired, before Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”.
Now, before me were his other masterpieces: “Starry Night”, “Imperial Crown fritillaries”, “Portrait of the Artist”, “The Poet”, “Caravans”.
“Van Gogh’s Bedroom” had a deep sense of loneliness about it, although he painted that room many times.
I also visited the wonderful Van Gogh exhibition that was in Perth this year (2023) and bought the fabulous CD with the sound track of the exhibition.
My iPhone captured two of the paintings for my personal delight; but my tears were for his sad life, for he only ever sold one painting and shot himself to escape his grinding poverty.
I slowly moved away from Vincent Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, to reflect upon the landscapes of Gauguin that were new to me, for I was familiar only with his work from his Tahiti period. There was so much more to see; so much more to learn.
I loved Pierre Bonnard and later bought a copy of “The White Cat”. His “Indolent Woman” and “The Man and the Woman” are intimate nude studies that show no coyness in displaying the charms of his muse, Maria (Marthe) Boursin whom he later married. Most of the other artists of the Nabi School were not very familiar to me, apart from Maurice Denis.
Exhausted after three hours in the Gallery, I went back to my hotel and to bed.
Shopping, mailing home, and visiting the White Lions.
The next morning, I returned to the Gallery to buy the catalogue, postcards, pencils, keyrings, and children’s books. I shared a taxi with a man from Pt Hedland, who had come even further than I had to see these lions of art. I made a quick trip to the Post Office to send a very heavy parcel home; jumped into a taxi and went to the Canberra Zoo to see the White Lions of Timbavati.
It poured with rain; I got drenched to the skin, and the indolent white lions made an art of being idle.
I bought some sox from the Canberra Zoo and later sent a pair to a Twitter friend in South Africa. He sent back a photo of them, on his feet, at the Zoo in Johannesburg.
This is why I love the internet, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, and websites. You can make friends all over the world and tell them your own stories.
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