VanGogh Alive

 This week Trish and I are at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, for our favorite pre-Christmas celebration.  This year, in addition to the Biltmore House, we have loved visiting the Van Gogh Alive exhibition at Deerfield Park on the Estate. (This is the same venue where we visited Downton Abbey year before last.)

The main part of Alive is in one very large room where there are multiple screens facing in every direction, including in the floor.

It IS Alive!

We sat on the floor along with most other people.  The Experience follows Van Gogh’s work through the course of his life to the moment of his death through a multi-media immersion in his painting accompanied by period appropriate music and highlighted by quotations from his journals reflecting upon his thoughts and work through each period of time.  Trish and I were entranced and stayed beyond a single showing of the experience.  It is extremely moving.

The way out.

When the living experience ends, you exit through a captivating mirror hall filled with sunflowers on all sides, even the ceiling.  The mirrors move you into infinity with the sunflowers.

Finally there is another large hall which interprets many of  Van Gogh’s individual works and includes a full scale model of the bedroom which was both the location and the subject of many of his later paintings. 

As this show moves around the country, it is well worth making plans to visit.

The real bedroom.