 |
| Self Portrait Vincent van Gogh Musee d'Orsay, Paris |
This boy would go there in Ms Goupil & Company, an art dealer firm. This boy is burdened with two things: his poverty and his creativity that the whole world was to remember forever.
That young man was none other than Vincent Van Gogh. He was the
man who would change the world of art.
Van Gogh had
two cleat-cut desires in his mind when he went to Paris. One was to meet and
learn from the master artists living in Paris. Another desire was to sell a
couple of paintings. He had succeeded only in fulfilling his first desire.
THE ART: An artist feels burdened when he or she has to say something untold till
the day or reveal something that is still un-revealed. The artist carries a
weight of the untold and un-revealed stories roaming within his or her heart
and mind. It is not the case that artistic passion is a featherweight
phenomenon; instead, it is like an iron block that heavily hammers the artist,
instigating him or her to speak out. Van Gogh had revealed his burden of
creativity in the recesses of his bordering sanity and mental illness that
frequently sent him into asylums.
Once the artist wants to reveal something, the action happens. A musician takes an instrument in hand; the writer takes a pen in hand. The painter is a person dealing with colours takes palette and brush in his or her. Whatever the form of art a person prefers to unburden the self, he or she tries conveying the passion embedded in him or her; the passion that is like a cloud, full of water; the passion that waits to become a message for the others.
While letting
the very passion goes out, an artist feels very strangely in a sense. He or she
experiences something like current passing through the being and the very flow
of the passion makes the artist himself or herself swept out from the scene.
That stage of experiencing made Van Gogh such a huge personality in the world
of art.
Here the master artist Van Gogh uses his well-established technique of presenting the strain of the emotion. And for that the painter had used short strokes of brushes, depicting the tension the artist was feeling inside of him and then releasing the same through the skill of the brush.
 |
|
THE ARTIST: In this self-portrait given above, Vincent Van Gogh has put the focal point of the painting on his beard. Strangely enough, he had used red for the beard, creating the full-blown tension in the middle of the frame.
Thereafter the tones of the colours subdue
for tense to somewhat released and finally, the tension looks ending in the
corners of the frame where the colours are in their palest hue.
However, his self Portrait given here is without the beard. It was sold for $71.5 Million in the year 1998, at Christie, New York. If the price is adjusted to the present level of the prices (2019), it would come to around $112.2 Million.
In this self-portrait, Van Gogh had used his skill of communicating through the eyes. In this self-portrait, the brush strokes are quite simple, but the background is helping enough to heighten the face-value.
 |
|
When I had put my first foot in the world of art, I was mesmerized by the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. I do not know why I loved Rembrandt, the son of a wealthy man, as I always failed to identify myself with rich men. In my virgin years, I desired to become like some of the wealthiest names; but I could never identify myself with those wealthy gentlemen, as those men and I had nothing in common.
But I could very well like Van Gogh. The greatness of Van Gogh, in addition to his being a great painter, was that he always owned two things in bulk. One was his madness and another was the emptiness of his pockets. I immediately shared his pocket position, and I had experienced some elements of madness while doing the first solo exhibition of my oil paintings.
When Van Gogh (1853-1890) had entered the streets of Paris, he did not know how he was going to make far-reaching influences on the world of art. Nor he knew that he would be remembered for hundreds of years. He did not know also that his life would end only at the age of 37 years. But the city of Paris was under the spell of contagious disease. And the name of that disease was the ‘artistic changes’. The colourful lava of impressionism was at its highest temperature. Painters like Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Edgar Degas were in full swing.
Van Gogh
recruited himself in the group. He suddenly became everybody’s darling. He
worked with many of the artists possessing towering fame. It was the time when
the lively paintings by impressionist artists done with striking colours were
in demand; it was the time when the Tahitian women painted by Gauguin
were a hot favourite in the market.
 |
| The Road Menders Vincent van Gogh Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington DC |
For the bubbling artist in Van Gogh, it was the best of the times. The masterpiece paintings like The Red Vineyard, The Night Café and Bedroom in Arles was the direct results of the Parisian effect on Van Gogh. His colours had become brighter, and the brush strokes pleasantly short. The short brush strokes could be the symbol of his increasing mental unrest due to his deteriorating health. We can see that effect in the brush-strokes applied in the painting The Road Menders given here. Van Gogh had made a permanent pact with two things: One was the art of painting and the second was his mental illness.
Van Gogh was not only good at using colours. He would become famous among
the ladies, too. Charming of the daughter of his landlady is one of the finest
examples of how he would be loved by the women. Moreover, his fame is due to
the efforts of one helping lady. She was the wife of his brother Theo who made Van Gogh so
famous after his death.
 |
|
There can be no more detailed explanation of the art of Van Gogh than what he said in his own words. The employment of artistic skills is a complex one in a sense. The painter’s work is somehow to make a replica of the mental images he or she has made after observing a natural scene or collection of the objects.
Here in the Saint-Rémy- Road with Cypress and Star (1890, the last year of his life), Van Gogh’s art seems to be at its peak. In this painting, he would have intended to charge the canvas with emotional energy. And for creating the expressive effect, he applied several necessary variations in brush strokes. We can see these variations, both in length and power. The final outcome is utterly aesthetic.
.jpg) |
|
Look at the painting Wheat Field with Cypresses. This painting was sold at a price of $57 Million in the year 1993. If the price is adjusted to the present level of the prices (2019), it would come to around $101 Million. In this painting, Van Gogh had used bright colours. It generated the required effects of light-infused in the painting.
In his private life, Van Gogh had passed through a turbulent road that was enough harsh to make him restless. In this painting, his feeling of restlessness has crept out and had taken the route of expression through the brush strokes. Here the brush-strokes look almost chaotic. We can see this technique of using the hyperactive brush in his other works, too, where he had succeeded in creating wonderful variety in expressive textures.
Van Gogh Searching for Subjects: The writers and poets have a poetic licence from the almighty god. The artists have this type of licence for using their artistic freedom, too. While acting upon this special authority, poetic licence, the painters impose the forms in their paintings. They do so by making the altered state of the forms.
However, the trend of imposing such transformed forms has never remained static. It has gone of constant change since the days of ancient artists’ work to the modern stock of the artistic outputs. And that is the reason why the forms on the canvases have always kept changing; the shapes of the objects painted have transformed themselves as per the wishes of a particular artist like Picasso and Van Gogh.
 |
| The Potato Eaters Oil on Canvas Vincent van Gogh Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Analysing The Painting: In the initial spell of his artistic journey, van Gogh found it
difficult to concentrate on the work of painting. He used dark and fast
colours initially. It was not the style of the time. it was not the practice in Paris. But his painting The Potato Eaters, which
he painted in the year 1885, gave him the required break and he was then
considered as an artist of value. Van Gogh's living in Paris and his friendship
with impressionist painter-friends helped him to understand the technique of painting
the effects of light. His stay in Brussels got him equipped with the knowledge
of perspective drawing and anatomy.
In this painting The Potato Eaters we can see the influence of
impressionism. Van Gogh's skill of perspective painting and his knowledge about
anatomy is visible in this painting. The manner in which he dealt with the
colours was robust. His conveying of messages was realistic. He had employed
all of these qualities in this painting. Though he was considered an impressionist
artist, the translation of his skill, onto canvases, as a draftsman was
stunningly impressive.
Remember the impressionists and the cubist style of painters who reproduce the forms as they perceive with their artistic eyes. These artists are like true revolutionist; their outputs, the paintings, hardly conform to the real forms in shape and size. In The Potato Eaters, the master artist Van Gogh had used his well-established technique of presenting the strain of emotion. And for that, the painter applied short strokes of brushes. Such strokes depict the tension the artist was feeling inside of him and then releasing the same through the skill of his brush. [All images are in Public Domain, taken from Wikimedia Commons]
.jpg){kind=link}
No comments:
Post a Comment