Major new Van Gogh show in Ottawa takes close-up view of artist as nature-lover

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Invited guests take in the van Gogh exhibit during a media tour of the special exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Wednesday May 23, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

OTTAWA - There doesn't seem to be anything particularly daring about getting down on your knees and elbows to take a close-up photo of a blooming flower or an interesting patch of foliage — the zoom is part of our snap-happy culture.

But when it's a renowned late-19th century painter applying that technique, you have something unusual indeed.

A major new show of the work of Vincent Van Gogh, "Up Close," opens Thursday at Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada and runs to Sept. 3. It zeros in on the artist's love of nature and his extraordinary method of bringing the viewer into the harvest-time field or verdant forest with him.

In "Tree Trunks in the Grass," for example, the audience feels as though they are sitting in the woods — blades of grass and dandelions are painstakingly depicted but there is no horizon to situate this quiet spot.

"The whole 20th century has been guided by this (photographic) way of looking, we're so familiar with it that we immediately think of him in that context," said guest curator Cornelia Homburg.

"It's a totally logical thing, but actually as an artist to choose that kind of angle was much before his time."

One of the most recognizable paintings of the show, "Almond Blossom," is a view from underneath a blooming tree, the branches set against an azure sky. Van Gogh painted the piece for his nephew.

It's a different take on Van Gogh — a familiar artist who many would tend to think of as an impetuous, off-balanced character fond of wild swirls of his brush and bold colours.

And then there's the whole cutting off his ear thing.

"We have an expectation of what Van Gogh is, and we see something different here. One realizes the richness of an artist, the multifacetedness of an oeuvre, that he can bring us a new experience every time," said Homburg.

"The artist was someone who wrote in his letters that he not only loved nature, but he also loved the very simple little things, and that a small blade of grass could be as important as a huge tree or a huge field.

"This idea that you can find something very pleasurable in something every simple is a beautiful one."

"Almond Blossom" in particular reveals Van Gogh's affinity for mid-19th century Japanese prints, which often depicted nature close-up. A separate room in the exhibit holds examples of such prints, an effort to contextualize Van Gogh's work.

Visitors are greeted at the beginning of the show by an enormous curved wall, wallpapered with a close-up of one of Van Gogh's paintings. The mural gives the viewer a sense of just how many brushstrokes went into a single piece.

The story of how the show came together is an interesting tale as well. Once curators Homburg and Anabelle Kienle Ponka came up with the concept, finding the pieces was an epic challenge. Museums and private owners had to be cajoled into lending out 40 of the 45 pieces — many of them have never been shown in Canada.

Homburg recounts some of the sleuthing she did to track down a few paintings that were in private collections.

Said Homberg: "I know I looked for one painting for almost five years, and we could not find it until somehow someone told me something and I could make a connection."

The "Van Gogh: Up Close" exhibition was jointly organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which ran the show from Feb. 1 to May 6.