Art
The Immersive Van Gogh Experience
By Danielle Bartholet ('23)'
The artistic masterpieces of Vincent Van Gogh are already astonishing as paintings themselves, but through the Immersive Van Gogh Experience, an exhibit of projections and lights that has been traveling throughout the world for the past year, they are truly brought to life. Its 360 degree view lets you practically step into the famous paintings through a 45 minute showcase of Van Gogh’s most famous works, including notable favorites like “Starry Night” and “Sunflowers”. I had the pleasure of visiting this once in a lifetime exhibition, finding it an exquisite tribute to the life and work of such an influential artist.
The experience begins with an entryway detailing the major events of Van Gogh’s life, including information about how those events influenced his art style. The gallery entrance leads into a wide room, where chairs are placed to watch the show. When the show starts, the floor to ceiling walls come alive with color and light, as Van Gogh’s paintings are displayed in unique and innovative ways, following his life and the changes in his art. From the darker pieces of his earlier life such as “The Potato Eaters”, to his famous self portraits, the art appears and fades, bringing the viewer into the beauty and feeling of each work. The show is set to beautiful classical music to enhance the overall experience, and the effect is bewitching and alluring.
I feel that the show did an excellent job of capturing every facet of meaning and depth that the art can convey, making each piece rise from the canvas to fill up the room. It’s art in a never-before-seen way, art as it’s truly meant to be experienced.
Student Poetry Submissions
Aire
By Danielle Bartholet ('23)
Through green trees and a gray sky, the breeze drifts, whispering through the quiet mountains hazed in morning mist.
The rushing winds stay in swirls around me, like soft hands on my skin, keeping me tethered to this earth until it will one day sweep and take me up into the eternal heavens above those mountains.
There is music in it, the slow strums of a guitar found around fires and in dances in woebegone villages
with browns and reds and yellows cascading through the air.
The steps of those running through the woods come up through the atmosphere, those wanting to go through the wind and emerge in a new place, a time where that music is real and not a ghost in the air.
It’s the music of a flute, the air creating the mournful notes through
the hollow reed of a flute that awakens nostalgia for something I have never even had before. How does the wind make this so real,
so tangible I can feel my longing in my clenched palm?
The air whips up those memories, those thoughts, taking them to a place that no one can reach yet that can always be seen.
Both in this world and not of it, reminding a paled, graying world of what still can,
and what forever cannot be.
The breeze is both friend and enemy of me.