Goghing on a culture trip

Day 29

Sunday found us taking a Van Gogh tour. There were seven of us plus the driver/guide Nicolas touring in a Mercedes van.

We made the one hour journey to Arles where Van Gogh lived for a year and was highly productive producing many pieces on canvas and drawings on paper. This is where he also suffered three psychotic episodes including the situation where he cut off part of his ear and gave it to a prostitute.

Some of his most famous works were done here including Yellow Café of which we have a print hanging over our fireplace. I was busy talking with one of the travellers on the tour and wasn’t catching all of the guides dialogue on the painter when I spotted a plaque displaying the painting in a courtyard and was lined up to take a picture of the plaque when Carol removed the phone from my hand and showed me that we were actually standing in front of the cafe itself. Duh. Click click click.

Later we were off to Les Baux de Provence where there was a spectacular Van Gogh show in an old underground rock quarry. The large rooms with towering ceilings were displaying a massive interconnected light show of many of his works. They were all moving and changing in unison with music playing all around us. The show is called Carrières Lumières and was very well-attended with cars parked hundreds of meters away along every possible roadway. The light show was displaying all of his major works on the walls. The booming sound system was playing classical pieces, along with Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, and much more the entire time. Check it out on YouTube as it doesn’t do it justice to describe it in words.

The final stop was in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh spent a year in the sanitorium trying to stabilize his life. He was very prolific here as well and created more than one hundred paintings and drawings while also working in and around the gardens. Around the grounds were plaques with some of the works that he created while in Saint-Rémy We walked about the grounds briefly but didn’t pay the price to see his actual room, but it was very enlightening anyways.

Then an hour-long return trip with Nicolas narrating in both French (for the Spanish couple) and English all of the history surrounding the towns and countryside we were travelling through on our way back to Avignon and our trip was complete.

The group we travelled with included a nice elderly (our age) Spanish couple who didn’t speak any English and kept to themselves for the most part, a gentleman from Hong Kong who was a seasoned traveler and wished everyone could experience his home country, and an Aussie couple who I spent the bulk of my time with. Grant and I were on the same page on many topics and we talked about our travels and traded stories. They were on a three month journey through Europe which seemed long at the time but it isn’t that hard to find travellers taking months off to explore other cultures.

There is a Van Gogh presentation at Musée d’Orsay in Paris that we’ll see when we’re there near the end of our trip. Now that we have some background on him and have seen the very places where he was creating his masterpieces it will open our minds to the circumstances that were his inspiration when we view the actual pieces. I can’t wait.