Art & Time Travel

I Could Have Told You, Vincent

One of the most satisfying experiences of the fusion of art and technology is for me the episode of Dr. Who in which the Doctor, through time travel, is able to return to the era in which Vincent Van Gogh lived and bring him back into modern times and show him how beloved his work has become. In his lifetime, Van Gogh never knew any recognition or success. 

His self portraits show a grim-faced but vulnerable man, exuding a sense of loneliness and bitterness, shadowed by pain. But so many of his paintings of nature are full of joy: spiralling stars, glowing in indigo sky, tables of outdoor cafes, astonishing trees. 

Reading a biography of Van Gogh will show us that, like many intensely creative people, he suffered bouts of depression and anguish, and eventually ended his own life, feeling himself unhonored and unsung. 

In the Dr. Who episode, in just a few minutes of television, this great injustice is remedied: the Doctor and his assistant bring Van Gogh into his future, and our present: to where his paintings are hung in his own room in one of the most famous Art Galleries in the world. 

Using tracking shots, following him as he follows them, unaware of the revelation to come, we witness his disbelief and then his sudden, staggering happiness, to see his work honored in this way, so publicly, and in such a wondrously beautiful place. 

While seeing all this, he overhears the Curator of the Gallery, when asked where he would place Van Gogh’s artistic achievement, say that he would rate his work foremost, for his great mastery of the use of colour, and that he is the most beloved of artists both as a painter and a man. 

Van Gogh is overwhelmed, and weeps tears of surprise. ‘Is it too much?’, asks the Doctor, embracing him. 

Van Gogh approaches the Curator of the Gallery and thanks him with great emotion, kissing him on both cheeks and embracing him also, in true French style. This knowledgeable man, although clearly startled, believes Van Gogh at first to be an enthusiastic, nervy aesthete, sharply attune to the brilliance and emotion of the artworks in the display. 

As they leave, the Curator takes a good look at him - those blue eyes, that orange beard - and begins to realise what cannot at first be grasped by his reason. That this is the creator of the works himself, seeing his own works through the power of science and technology which is, as Arthur C. Clarke described it, ‘indistinguishable from magic’. 

This is the what time travel should be used for: to show those who are bone-weary, frustrated and discouraged, who feel as if they have failed, that their efforts have won through that negativity and nihilism and that their work produced with such skill and power will shine brightly, for so many others to see and be inspired by. 

It is the substance of things hoped for, the definition of faith: it is the realization of the dream. A few moments of television, like the brush strokes of the painter themselves, layer and accentuate our senses, and awareness. They bring the scene to life. 

One of my favourite of his paintings is the one he did of his own small bedroom, with its narrow bed and sense of containment.  I love his surprising and exuberant use of yellow amidst the blues and greys. 

Monet’s lovely gardens and lilies at Giverny do not move me as much as Van Gogh’s stars. How much beauty he created through the endurance of the difficulties of his life, through the visions he saw, of the stark contrasts and realities of our shared existence, and the imagination which transforms it. 

Those who have eyes, let them see.