posted May 13, 2008
Author Lin Arison and photographer Neil Folberg have collaborated to create, "Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists: Discovering the Connections," a book that combines paintings and contemporary photography. They will discuss this project at the Hunter Museum of American Art on Tuesday, May 27, at 3 p.m. Admission to this program is free to the public.
Copies of the book-a combination memoir, art book, biography and travelogue-are available at the Hunter Museum Store.
"It's about art, but it's really more about human beings," said Ms. Arison, whose late husband was Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted Arison.
The project began in 2000 when Ms. Arison and her 15-year-old granddaughter, Sarah, set out on a trip through France little aware of the transformation the month-long journey would have on both their lives. For Ms. Arison, a seasoned traveler, the experience was a spiritual awakening that resulted in the book, "Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists: Discovering the Connections."
In the book, Ms. Arison guides readers from Auvers to Arles to Giverny to Mont Sainte-Victoire through her narrative. Reproductions of classic paintings of the period are paired with Neil Folberg's contemporary photographs. Together, author and photographer shed new light on this well-documented period.
The ageless vitality of the painters resonates in Folberg's take on the very sites and subjects that inspired the artists. His camera translates a Degas drawing of young dancers, hands folded behind their backs, into a graphic, black and white image of two contemporary ballet students alone in a studio. The star-lit street scene of Van Gogh's "Café-Terrace at Night" is suggested in a photograph of a similar street, with its outdoor restaurant replaced by a mysterious, parked car.
Twinning the lives and struggles of the Impressionist artists with the personal discoveries they inspired in Ms. Arison, the book begins with the devastating death of her husband, Ted, the convention-defying, visionary creator of Carnival Cruise Lines. With her identity no longer coupled with that of her iconoclastic husband and still in deep mourning, Ms. Arison begins to experience a vague, but quietly persistent need to proclaim her own singular talents. Her almost obsessive exposure to the work of Van Gogh and the Impressionists deepened her empathy with their dogged independence. It fostered her own determination and artistic vision and renewed her commitment to using her creative resources to make a significant difference in the lives of up and coming artists (most especially through youngARTS, a pioneering project she and her husband founded 26 years ago). Sarah Arison, whose interest in the arts was stimulated by her encounter with the Impressionists as a 15-yearold, now heads the Arison Arts Foundation.
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