5 art-related things that sparked something in me this week
Link to the post on my substack
I’ve been reading Letters to Theo by Vincent van Gogh.
It is the correspondence Vincent wrote throughout his life to his brother.
The letters are in turn poetic, funny, witty, delightfully weird, and all in all wonderful. For instance, in this 1883 letter, he starts with: I feel what Pa and Ma instinctively think about me (I don’t say reasonably). There’s a similar reluctance about taking me into the house as there would be about having a large, shaggy dog in the house. He’ll come into the room with wet paws – and then, he’s so shaggy. He’ll get in everyone’s way. And he barks so loudly. In short – it’s a dirty animal. I mean, the man was funny.I visited Auvers-sur-Oise and stopped by the Château d’Auvers for the exhibition The Last Journeys of Vincent Van Gogh.
It focuses on his last four years. The audio guide is narrated by Wouter van der Veen – who was also invited by Radio France to talk about Vincent and money (he describes himself as a free biographer on the subject). The exhibition starts with Theo’s success in Paris with his gallery, then moves on to Vincent’s life in Paris, and then the usual steps: Arles, Saint-Rémy, Auvers-sur-Oise. The exhibition concludes with a short animated film by Fleur de Papier, telling the story of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. She was Vincent’s brother Theo’s wife, widowed at 28 with a baby. She devoted her life to making his art known, in a world of men who considered her, at best, irritating and obsessed with a dead, unknown crazy guy. I instantly adored her.In an episode on Radio France, Jan Blanc, art historian, talks about how Vincent did not associate painting with pain, as many people depict him, so much as he saw painting as a healing process. In that sense, the paintings with the cut ear are not about that at all, but rather paintings with the bandaged ear.
I saw the animated film Loving Vincent, a 2017 British-Polish production that tells the story of an investigation into the death of Vincent van Gogh through the character of Armand Roulin, son of the postman Roulin, one of Vincent’s friends. The film alternates between sequences painted entirely by hand in oil, imitating more than 80 of Van Gogh’s canvases, and black-and-white passages recounting periods or episodes of his life that he did not paint. I watched the making-of video on YouTube: more than 80 oil painters were hired to paint Vincent’s canvases after the scenes were filmed against a green screen. The character of Armand Roulin must deliver Vincent’s last letter to Theo and therefore travels to Paris, where he meets Père Tanguy, and then to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he seeks out Dr. Gachet. In Paris, he wanders through paintings of the Moulin de la Galette, the vineyards of Montmartre, and the Place Clichy. The filmmakers explain that some of the paintings’ color palettes had to be modified to match the season chosen for the film: summer. The palette was therefore borrowed from other of Vincent’s paintings of Paris depicting summer.
In the same vein as oil painting, I tested the set of brushes made by Manero Brushes to reproduce this technique on Procreate. He offers a few tutorial videos on YouTube. I focused on several brushes in particular (fine oil brush, thick paint 1, using oil dry marks as a blender).
Manero’s tutorials are excellent, but quite fast to follow, so I prefer to do the main steps at the same time as him, then try to make my own painting separately without trying to reproduce the whole detailed process, because I find that I learn better by doing my own. I made an illustration with a van Gogh inspiration (photo from the newsletter). Thousands and thousands of tiny brushstrokes.