We were given a DVD for Christmas called Loving Vincent. This chronicles an investigation into the two months artist Vincent Van Gogh spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise prior to his untimely death. It follows one of several less conventional theories as to how the artist met his end but is most notable for its beautiful rotoscope-style integration of the story with the many paintings dating to that summer of 1890.
My interest piqued, I found that there had recently been an exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay on this subject and I bought the handsome volume that accompanied it. This locates some of the paintings onto a period map of Auvers so it became possible to consider doing an OpenSim build on the topic. This is not a novel idea; there is already an excellent build of part of Arles in much the same vein on the Littlefield grid and for all I know someone may have recreated Auvers as well. Doing my own build, however, is an interesting challenge and an excellent opportunity to explore the environment that attracted so many painters, not just Vincent.
Accordingly, I have acquired an inexpensive 1km x 1km sim on the Wolf Territories Grid (WTG), half of which will be devoted to virtual Auvers. I have been resident on a number of grids over the years and they all tend to have their own idiosyncracies and that is often part of their charm. So I look forward to exploring WTG and what it has to offer in terms of developing this new build while tentatively blogging my progress here on micro.blog, another platform new to me.
