Van Gogh&#8217;s signature on &quot;Basket with Six Oranges.&quot;
Van Gogh's signature on "Basket with Six Oranges." (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

To understand why the Denver Art Museum's "Becoming van Gogh" truly succeeds, you have to travel to the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, 10 miles north into the suburbs, where 25-year-old Rachel Danis is getting the sexiest tattoo this side of the Seine. An inky, indigo sleeve of the artist's famous painting "Starry Night" stretches from her left wrist toward her shoulder.

It is art and she is suffering for it — 18 hours of needles so far from talented tattoo master Paul Berkey at Mile-High studio in Thornton. They're about half-done.

"It kind of feels like a cat scratch," Berkey explains, etching pointedly into her forearm.

"On top of a sunburn," Danis adds.

As it goes in the museum district, so goes it in Thornton.

Rachael Danis&#8217; &quot;Starry Night&quot; sleeve tattoo.
Rachael Danis' "Starry Night" sleeve tattoo. (Provided by Rachael Danis)

To do van Gogh, to really do the madman, you have to go extremes. Maybe you hire Berkey to turn an iconic painting into body art, pay him $100 an hour, make a lifetime commitment.

Or maybe you work up the confidence to ask every major museum in North America and Europe to loan you a van Gogh painting or sketch. You charm 60 collections into sending 70 works to an operation in Colorado that doesn't even have a van Gogh. You hang it all on the wall as if you are doing the world a favor, which just by trying so hard, you are.

Either way you get there, into the awesome and eccentric head of van Gogh. Into his profound blues, his agitated oranges, the dabs and arabesques of his famous brush.

Ironically, "Becoming van Gogh" aspires to be the opposite of extreme. It is a chronological, fully logical lesson on van Gogh's career.

The 10,000-square-foot exhibit starts viewers with the early pencil drawings van Gogh copied from do-it-yourself manuals, passes through his experiments with paint and form and climaxes at his calculated mastery of color.

Installation specialists John Lupe, left and Kevin Hester hang Van Gogh&#8217;s &quot;Edge of a Wheatfield&quot; (1887) .
Installation specialists John Lupe, left and Kevin Hester hang Van Gogh's "Edge of a Wheatfield" (1887) . (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

It plays down the influence of the artist's mental illness, his bloody acts of self-destruction, in favor of a discussion about how he held his pen.

The list of van Gogh's maladies — possible, probable or conjectured — is legend: depression, addiction, hallucinations, ear-clipping, suicide.

But those things, "Becoming van Gogh" argues, define a man's life, not his art. The museum wants us to associate a different list of words with the Dutch painter: systematic, tactical, rational, studied.

That in itself is extreme. To reduce all that dark and cranky stuff to van Gogh's "restless life" — as curators Timothy J. Standring and Louis van Tilborgh do in the show's catalogue — and pretty much dismiss its impact on his brush, is a radical makeover.

Sue Tatem&#8217;s version of &quot;Starry Night&quot; over Aspen.
Sue Tatem's version of "Starry Night" over Aspen. (Provided by Sue Tatem)

They do make their point effectively, and with the force of an exhibition that's worth three times the $25 they charge to see it. The early dark sketches of old women are there, the flowers, those triumphant landscapes, rendered in golds, yellows and greens.

But they miss a point, too. We like van Gogh a little crazy.

Another van Gogh

To understand just how crazy, you need only walk across Bannock Street from the DAM parking lot, into the studio of Bob Coates.

The Denver artist spent 100 straight days this summer repainting van Gogh's 40 self-portraits on old window panes he collected from people's trash. It's difficult to tell why, exactly, other than that Coates decides he will do something, then does it.

His piece — it is one massive work with nearly 80 parts — hangs from the ceiling in his no-heat, no plumbing loft. You can walk through it, viewing paintings from both their opaque side where he applied colors, and the glossy side through the glass.

The installation is slapped together — on storm windows, sash windows, sliding doors and antique wooden frames old enough to have known van Gogh personally. The paint is from Home Depot's reject sample pile. Coates describes it as a "multi-media, multi-dimensional, conceptual, lunatic kind of thing."

It's better than that really, and more serious than its creator pretends. Coates gave himself great leeway to interpret van Gogh, he didn't copy so much as rethink things in a great rush. Some of it is precise, some abstract, the colors are odd. If it weren't for the occasional set of green-and-blue eyes, or a bandaged ear, we might lose van Gogh entirely in the work.

It ends up as an homage but also an indictment, a self-indulgent exploration of self-indulgence. Van Gogh drew or painted himself dozens of times in just a few years. Imagine. Then imagine copying that. Then imagine charging $100,000 for it.

Coates suggests that his piece is "unseeable." Light pours through the glass canvases in different volumes during the day so it never appears the same way twice.

But light doesn't make it so good. Effort does.

The same is true of "Becoming van Gogh." It does not have the painter's biggest hits, the sunflowers and irises on the note cards and puzzles in DAM's gift shop. Every object is not van Gogh's best, even though we want to project greatness on an early drawing like "Girl Carrying a Loaf of Bread" because we know where it's leading.

There are wonders for sure, 1887's "Grass and Butterflies," with its long and short brush strokes; 1888's "Basket With Six Oranges," with its balanced light and color; 1889's "Peach Trees in Blossom" where van Gogh renders a dirt road, surprisingly and convincingly, in periwinkle, reds and white.

The best objects are better because the early work shows us why. "Becoming van Gogh" isn't a risky exhibit, but it takes more work to see than a simple retrospective of still lifes or portraits. It jars us, as it has to, to make us rethink a painter that is so familiar.

One big sky

To understand how familiar, you could drive over the Rocky Mountains to Aspen where artist Sue Tatem will paint you a personalized version of "Starry Night" set over any locale you request.

Tatem, a retired biology professor, has borrowed van Gogh's colors and swirls to produce memorable evenings over Grand Junction and Maroon Bells, over Sag Harbor on Long Island, over Lahaina, Hawaii, where she has a winter place.

"Probably the reason I started is that I wanted to learn how to make a night painting, and that's the most famous one of all," said Tatem, fully in the spirit of van Gogh, who was self-taught.

Tatem means her works to be homages to van Gogh, and they are. She studies the architecture or vegetation of a place she is depicting, then subs the details where appropriate. A courthouse might stand in for the church steeple in the original, a palm tree could cover for van Gogh's cypresses.

Then she paints. "I can do that in a day, but usually I do it over two or three days," she said.

Tatem takes liberties — she uses acrylics because oils give off too many fumes in her condo — but she's a smart painter and her work makes a point: van Gogh belongs to everyone.

Van Gogh might appreciate that. He was a freewheeling borrower himself, and the idea is part of what makes "Becoming van Gogh" interesting — for better and worse.

At the DAM, in addition to the van Gogh works are 20 pieces from artists that inspired him as he learned to paint, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, his friend Emile Bernard.

The relationships between the paintings are striking. On one wall, hangs Adolphe Monticelli's vase full of flowers titled "Bouquet" from 1875. Next to it is van Gogh's own "Vase with Zinnias," from 1886. We see van Gogh's unfettered annexing; copying was his way of experimenting with line, the thickness of paint.

Van Gogh played with the dabs and points of Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, too. The exhibit proves it, placing works within view.

This goes on and on, and drives home the exhibit's theme that van Gogh was full of plan and structure, that his route was more ordinary than his wild reputation allows.

In some ways this is overdue. Van Gogh died in 1890, the same year Groucho Marx and Colonel Sanders were born. He is of our own age practically and it makes sense to demystify him.

But it is a distinctly American take, crediting his triumphs to hard work, good wits and the drive to succeed — as if he were Henry Ford or Steve Jobs or Barack Obama.

Thing is, none of those men checked themselves into insane asylums. None bloodied their own bodies or famously ran with prostitutes, not yet anyway.

And if you stare at the exhibit's best wares, you see there's something more than painterly progress that made van Gogh great. Vincent stepped off cliffs, and that you cannot credit to logic.

Common sense does not color a road in periwinkle, or paint "Grapes, Lemons, Pears and Apples" that appear as part of an apparition; it doesn't capture the strange stares of "Postman Joseph Roulin" and "Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle;" it does not see those eruptive skies over "Landscape from Saint-Remy."

It wasn't drive that made van Gogh a better painter than Seurat or Toulouse-Lautrec. It was the way his aching mind put it all together. The way he let dare rule over fear.

Fully committed

You can understand dare by watching Paul Berkey and Rachel Danis at work on her tattoo. Berkey, who is 28 and trained as an architect, designed it by combining elements from 1888's "Starry Night Over the Rhone" and 1890's "The Starry Night."

The difficult part was figuring out how to connect the right side of the painting to the left where they don't naturally come together. He made a drawing on paper, then outlined it with a Sharpie marker on Danis' arm before applying the ink.

"You have to be 110 percent sure this is going to work, because once you start...." he said.

Things are shifted about, but it honors the original, comes together seamlessly. There's an urgency to the intense blues and blacks, a romance in the reflective moonlight.

The work covers up a few unsightly tattoos Danis got "on a whim." She wanted something memorable, elegant. She always loved van Gogh.

It's more than she can afford, almost more than she can bear. Coloring around the delicate elbow bone is yet to come. She tolerates it with grace.

"This is going to be with me the rest of my life," she said. "It's an investment."

As a piece of art, it is systematic, yet radical, tactical though not uptight, studied for sure. But its magic comes from the fact that Rachael Danis' "Starry Night" tattoo, as it becomes one with her skin, is more than a little crazy.

With the courage of the madman himself, she is becoming van Gogh.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, or

"BECOMING VAN GOGH." The Denver Art Museum presents a career retrospective of Vincent van Gogh, along with works from artists who inspired him. Through Jan. 20. 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock streets, $13-$25. 720-865-5000 or