Van Gogh (and Gaugin, but he really is the aside).

Me and my parents drove through white out conditions down to Benton Harbor where we met my Aunt Annie (Dad's little sister) and her daughter, Jesse and rode the rest of the way to Chicago with them.

-note: i FUCKING hate the hiccups.-

We stayed in the Hotel Burnham, which is a grand 15 floors high, in one of the first skyscrapers in the city. This place had bellhops and doormen and was right right downtown. They had a wine tasting at 5p. There were bathrobes in the rooms. The soap and shampoo and lotion they provided was Aveda. Annie got us some serious corporate travel rate, cause she's a corporate bigwig, so instead of $400-$600 a night, it was more like $150. Small rooms with a lakeview and the street and the top of the old navy building and three blocks from the Art Institute and twelth floor. That was probably the only time in my life that I will see such living. (Annie kept saying "I would stay here again." and I was thinking something along the lines of "there was a question? the only question i had was how the fuck i would ever afford this sort of thing...)

The exhibit: Gaugin, well, nobody likes Gaugin. Or at least I don't. He shouldn't have been a painter. They had some of his ceramic pieces, sculputural vessels all, they were really incredible. The self portrait mug that I'm thinking of was really beautiful in person. It has bright blood red drips over the very brown earthy ceramic finish that never came through in the reproductions I've seen. And some other pieces that I'd never seen, not that I'm a great art buff in general and certainly not a Gaugin buff, what with all the 'i don't like gaugin'. They had a few pen and ink drawings that were kind of nice too. But I really dislike his painting in general. In some of the paintings from when he was in Arles living with VanGogh start to have some interesting things paintwise going on in individual areas, but it never makes it out of a cheek, or a thigh or a flower. They had quotes from each of them along the tops of all the gallery walls, and the ones from Gaugin kept saying things about how he was going to change, and just you wait and you'd see an entirely new Gaugin. And you'd look at the paintings, and they were all exactly the same. I especially dislike the outlining thing he does. He outlines everything. It's like he does a painting and then goes back and outlines everything, just in case you didn't get it already. It's like he's painting in a coloring book or something. It was cool to see such a collection of his work, though, and some of the things from the period in Arles, next to VanGogh's work with the same subjects. They had a few things in the very last gallery from after he'd gone to Haiti or Tahiti or wherever. These were a little more interesting, and I guess that's kind of what he's famous for. That and the Christ on the cross painting, and the whole living with Van Gogh thing. I don't know, the painting style and sensibility and the composition and the paint application and the pallette all remained the same, but the subject matter was more interesting, and somehow the style that he'd already developed seems to fit the subject matter better.

Okay, so Van Gogh. From a painting standpoint his paintings are a lot of fun to look at, because you can really see how he did them. There are gobs of paint and you can see the layers and the brush strokes and etc. I like all the self portraits, because a lot of what people like about Van Gogh is the drama, and he very much develops this persona through the self portraits. Somehow they seem to distill everything else in his paintings. There's a lot of repetition throughout his work I guess, though. They had the starry night from his time in Saint-Remy - the famous one. i wasn't particularly impressed by it. I guess part of it was that I wanted it to be bigger, it's not very big, I wanted it Huge. They had a bunch of landscapic paintings from that period, that I was relatively unimpressed with actually. Lots of swirly wildness, as with the starry night, and lots of outlining things, that he clearly got from Gaugin (damn him!) and they're somewhat pleasing to look at, but i don't like them. They had another, earlier starry night painting (starry night over the rhone) that was very beautiful, however. And they had a single sunflower on a blue background and painting of a boot that were both just incredibly amazingly beautiful. I had a very similar reaction to them as to a show of one of the Grad students in the art school that I saw earlier this year. She's a ceramic artist, and it was hundreds and hundreds of small tubes and twisted chunks of clay that were all highly textured and it was just incredibly beautiful and i had an extremely strong positive reaction to them.

Okay, I got distracted by thinking about that. I guess I'm done talking about the show then.

We went out to dinner while we were in Chicago. We went to Arun's, which is a Thai restaraunt of the sort where there is no menu. You walk in and they give you a wine list. There's a twelve course meal of whatever the cook feels like cooking, and maybe a few extra courses if he's cheerful. And all the courses are very small, and there's space between, and you sit and all this beautiful and delicious food keeps coming and coming and coming and the waiters explain each course and how to eat it, and it was a lot of fun. That's another sort of thing that I'm probably never going to experience again. I wouldn't even know how to find a restaraunt like that. The drinks alone cost around $100. Wheee! (and thanks to my parents for taking me....)

okay, I'm gonna go look for pictures of painting that I talk about now, so I can link off to them and then people will have some clue what the fuck I'm talking about.