Surrounded by art

All right, I admit it.  Lately I have not been doing something new every day.  A lot of my time, almost all of several days in fact, has been spent writing and addressing holiday cards.  Since I don't give presents, I do like to send cards to the people who matter to me, and there are an awful lot of those.

I have also been working in an intense online training program for an organ donation center in Atlanta.  This program is designed to give Family Care Counselors a chance to experience approaching grieving families, both to help the family members through this most horrible time of their lives and also to broach the subject of organ donation.  That's a delicate kind of conversation which requires tact, confidence, knowledge, compassion, good timing, and the ability to talk about death without squeamishness.  I am playing a woman whose husband is alive but so brain damaged, he will never recover.  My daughter and I are presented with the necessity of choosing whether to place him in long term care, to live the rest of his life as a vegetable, or to "pull the plug" and honor his wishes to be an organ donor.  It has been an emotionally draining role, but so very satisfying.  I love doing this kind of program, using my acting talents in service to people who work in such an important, high stakes profession.

Anyway, today the program is on a break, so I took the day to do something that has been on my Someday list since I heard about months ago.  In an industrial neighborhood of Seattle, near our two sports stadia, is the Van Gogh Immersive Exhibition.  I wasn't even exactly sure what that meant, but I knew it sounded intriguing and unique, so I got two tickets and went with Sweet Hubby to immerse ourselves in art.

It's a wonderful exhibition.  I learned a lot about Van Gogh's short life, and of course there are many prints of his work.  But this installment goes beyond that, using projections and CGI to give visitors a feeling of being surrounded by and inside his works, in some cases seeing images in the paintings (a horse cart in a field, a boat on a river, etc.) moving, in others seeing paintings flow from one into another.  And there is music to add to the all around experience, including Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons".  

I'm not really describing it well enough to get across the sensory feast it is.  I found it inspiring, relaxing, stimulating, beautiful, and - I don't use this word lightly - awesome.  Nothing can truly compete with an in-person viewing of his paintings, but this exhibition does a great job of conveying not just the look but the feel, the emotion, of his works.  If you live here and can see it, or if you hear of it coming to your city, I highly recommend you give it to yourself or someone else as a very special treat.