Always somewhere between living and dying

Magnet #894 - Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Vincent and the Doctor is one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who - ever, where Eleven and Amy go back to visit Van Gogh. Loved that. And one of my favorites scenes is here, when they wake Vincent up out of one of his paintings, and he peers out his window at Amy sitting among the sunflowers, and Amy learns that he doesn't really have a thing for sunflowers.

Several canvases seem to say the opposite, for Van Gogh painted at least a dozen still lifes of sunflowers in every stage. From gorgeous full blooms to dying blossoms strewn on the ground, it was clear he had some sort of affinity for them.

The backstory being that people aren't really that sure if he loved the flowers themselves, or if he just painted them to please his buddy Paul Gauguin. Or, if he painted them because at the time, yellow paint was a new set of hues that they came out with and he loved experimenting with those shades and the joyfulness of the color.

At any rate, he considered the sunflowers his flower to paint.

And now, of course, now I feel the need to run over to the Met to check out their batch of sunflowers.

Van Gogh was one of our answers to one of the clues during last Saturday's Watson Adventures' Murder at the Met scavenger hunt. I've done the same hunt before, but with a different set of clues. Hard! I dunno if you guys have ever done one, but I love them.

For two hours, you think of nothing but getting to the next clue by solving the one you're working on, and getting lost in the details and figuring out red herrings, and not really seeing the art in front of you. Mind you, I'm not always so good with figuring out those clues, but I'm really good at getting you where you need to go when it comes to getting around the Met. Well, unless you're looking for cups from the first millennia in two different rooms. And you lose 20 minutes because of it. Oops.

For me, though, the best part about that scavenger hunt was that it brought me to rooms I'd never been to before - I can't wait to get back there to explore them...and those sunflowers.