For me, there’s nothing like visiting a gallery – I love the quiet hussle and bussle that surrounds the larger spaces, and the near silence that you find in the smaller ones. I find myself inspired to work and learn in a way that no other environment incurs. Just to be in the same room as many of these pieces is a thrill, and the opportunity to see it as you could never before is even more exciting.

So imagine my reaction when I heard about the Google Art Project – a Street View version of some of the world’s most famous galleries. I find Street View to be fairly frustrating on the whole – I never end up where I want to go and I am constantly zoomed in and out and turned in every direction contrary to wherever I am trying to tell the thing to go. Put this in an art gallery – my quiet and calm sanctury? No thanks.

But I found myself on the website, and in MoMA, New York – a gallery I have visited a few times in the past and greatly enjoyed. I was in a gallery surrounded by Rousseau, Seurat and van Gogh along with a few pieces that, in true Street View style, had been blurred out. Trying to negotiate this space was, as predicted, infuriating and long winded – to the point of almost giving up. I couldn’t get to any of the art work I wanted to see and I seemed trapped in this one gallery space with the rest of the museum taunting me from the other side of the open doorways.

However, once I had managed to get myself near a piece and clicking through to it, van Gogh’s The Starry Night, I was staggered. The detail of the image was intense. You could see all the textures and cracks, the canvas itself peeping through the thick layers of paint, the faintest of contrast in colour and change in stroke direction. I was just staring and staring. I couldn’t get over it.

However, as much of a thrill it is to see these pieces uninterrupted and in such detail, there is inevitably something lost. I am sure that this will become and invaluable resource for those who lack the means to be able to travel to see these artworks for themselves, but there is nothing like standing in front of the canvas as the artist did all those years ago.