About 20 years ago, the art world went through a spasmodic love affair with Vincent van Gogh. It turned out a lot of the high prices were complete bunk - artificially inflated, Enron-style - but however you looked at it, van Gogh was, for a little while, the be-all and end-all of painting. Personally, I didn't get it. Then a few years later, I saw my first "live" van Gogh.
And I got it, instantly.
Van Gogh does not translate on a flat page or screen. He painted in three dimensions, piling and shaping the paint until the shadows of the textures intermingled with the shadows of the image he was recasting. It's not sculpture, it's far more subtle than that, but the end result is a visual sledgehammer.
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