YouTube Video: "Art Eyes: The Eyes of Vincent Van Gogh"

This is a very short video (1 minute 14 seconds) put up by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC of one of Vincent's many self-portraits.  It focuses on seeing Vincent's brushstrokes and glops of paint in places which tell just as much about what type of person Vincent was as does his physical features.

The thing that touches me the most about Vincent's art is that you can see his brushstrokes.  Those brushstrokes are the way Vincent achieves immortality.  I don not believe in God or heaven, but I do believe in brushstrokes.  Usually these are hidden or blended in so that the canvass looks like a photo -- even before the invention of cameras.  By letting us see his brushstrokes, Vincent was letting us peek into the creative fires of an artist.

Painting Focus: Cornfield with Cypresses, 1889

"I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.” - Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 to 1890) went through several styles before settling on his trademark thick applications of vibrant colors. By July of 1889, he had less than one year to live. He also produced some of his best-known works, including one his most distinctive landscapes, “Cornfield with Cypresses.” Once considered worthless, this priceless work can be seen in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art ....

Please read the rest of my article at Helium.  Thanks! (Link has now been fixed. )

"Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh"; Edited by Iriving Stone: My Review

One of the most popular books about Vincent written is this edited collection of Vincent's letters to his long-suffering brother Theo.  Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh (1937) begins when Vincent is full of missionary zeal and is off to the Borinage.  It goes on through his disillusion with the Church, with other artists and with life in general.  The collection was edited by Irving Stone, author of the popular fictional biography about Vincent, Lust for Life (1934.)

I'm not lucky enough to have a first edition, so this review is based on the far more available 1995 reprint with the cover shown at left.

This book is very hard going.  There are no footnotes explaining current politics, fads or nicknames.  There are also no pictures, so you need to read this in tandem with a book of Vincent's art or you could constantly Google names and painting titles.  This greatly interrupts the book's narrative flow. 

Vincent also would fall out with people he would glowingly write to his brother about in one letter and then never mention them again.  Vincent also suffered from paranoia and would describe in great detail conspiracies being plotted against him.  Since there is no mention in the book that these are just delusions, the reader does get the picture that Vincent was a long-suffering heroic target of the status quo.  He wasn't.  He was mostly ignored and survived only through the generosity of his brother and some other temporary patrons, but he was not the target of a sophisticated plot.

There are times when I wish I could've smacked Vincent upside the head.  Artistic genius or not, he was remarkably stupid.  He also would not shut up about money.  Granted, when I was homeless, I got a little obsessed over every penny I could get a hold of, but even I didn't grouse about it in every letter I sent my parents.

In conclusion, I don't recommend this book unless you are seriously nuts about Vincent and are familiar with the times Vincent lived in.

3 Best Starry Night Parodies

Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night."  It's one of the most recognized and beloved paintings in the world.  It also is the basis for some killer parodies.

These are my three favorites and hopefully yours, too.  I have some more parodies of Vincent's works (not just "The Starry Night") up on my Pinboard appropriately named Van Gogh Parody Gallery.

This Blog Made It's First Cent!

Just a quick post to celebrate (sarcasm) that this Vincent blog has made it's first cent with GoogleAds.  So soon after Vincent's birthday, too.  I keep this up and someday I can purchase a stamp so I can mail a congratulatory card to myself.  Perhaps I could buy one of the many stamps issued featuring Vincent, such as this 2008 sheet from the Union of Cormoros. 

I wonder if Vincent Van Gogh (the prodigious letter writer) ever wrote letters to himself and mailed them.  He argued with everybody else in his life -- why not himself?  Although other people kept his letters, he tended not to keep letters written to him.

Painting Focus: Irises (1889)

"How well he understood the exquisite nature of flowers!” – Octave Mirbeau, first owner of “Irises”

It’s one of the most recognizable – and expensive – paintings in the world. It was one of the very few works that received critical praise during Vincent Van Gogh’s brief but tortured life. It’s known simply as “Irises.” It was painted in 1889 while Van Gogh was recuperating at an asylum at Saint-Remy in Southern France.  The flowers grew in the asylum's garden.

Such an iconic image seems almost commonplace today, but back in 1889 it was a whole new way of looking at the world. What were Van Gogh's inspirations? There were many, which he somehow distilled the essence of each and brought it to this particular canvass. Here is a look at some of them.

Japanese Woodcuts

Japanese art and fashion became faddishly popular in mid-1800s France and Belgium. It was still popular during Van Gogh's ten-year career as an artist. He also collected Japanese woodcut prints and even tried his hand at copying a few. Prints made from Japanese woodcuts have clear, bright colors and flowing, curving forms making people, animals, buildings, boats and nature as essentially the same stuff.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Although many art history books claim Japanese woodcuts were Van Gogh's major inspiration, there also seems to have been some influence by Van Gogh's contemporary, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901.) He was also influenced by Japanese art. Among his best-known works were vibrant posters that used a limited palette of bright colors and curving, sensuous lines. Both artists briefly knew each other when both lived in Paris in 1886. Van Gogh was very familiar with Toulouse-Lautrec's work.

The Irises Themselves

The point of view of "Irises" is much different than flower studies done in the past - even flower studies done by Vincent. Usually they were of a garden or selected flowers arranged in a vase. But this time the viewpoint is right down at the level of the irises. Each flower and leaf bends and if carrying a heavy burden and yet springs up resiliently. By this time, Van Gogh had abandoned religion and used nature and art to fill the gap. The power of nature is certainly apparent in the lush green leaves.

His Inner Life

There's nothing in the painting to indicate that these flowers are growing in an asylum. That may have been intentional. Van Gogh, who once so desperately wanted to be a portrait painter, found out that he was gifted at painting common objects like flowers. He personalized the flowers. He may have thought of himself and the other asylum inmates as the irises, growing out of the dirt.

If Van Gogh Was So Great, Why Didn't He Sell More in His Lifetime?

This is a loaded question that Van Gogh fans often hear.  The insinuation, of course, is that the art world only likes its artists dead.  Another insinuation is that people buy art only if it has been declared "great" by a certain amount of critics.

Now, if you really do not like the art of Vincent Van Gogh, there is nothing anyone can write that is going to change your mind.  Van Gogh's art is polarizing; you either love it or hate it. 

Van Gogh was getting some critical praise in 1890, the year he would commit suicide.  He had paintings in two major exhibitions in 1889 and 1890 and a large positive write-up in the French magazine Mecure de France by respected art critic Albert Aurier.  A translated version of the article, "The Isolated Ones" is up on the Vincent van Gogh Gallery website.  It seemed that Van Gogh was poised for stardom -- or, at least, poised to earn enough money for paints and smokes. 

The main problem with why Van Gogh didn't sell during his lifetime was due to Van Gogh's abrasive personality.  He went out of his way to offend people -- including the very people he needed to ask favors from, such as restaurant owners (which often displayed art) and art dealers.  He argued so much with all of his art teachers that they kicked him out of their studios after a few weeks.

Van Gogh's early work (1885 in particular) was very dark, with depressing subjects and people painted in a grotesque fashion, such as the portrait above.  His art dealer brother, Theo, would constantly beg Vincent to stop doing black and white drawings and concentrate on bright paintings like those of the leading Impressionists of the day, Monet and Degas.

Although Vincent eventually took his brother's advice, he spent most of his time drawing or painting exactly what others advised him NOT to paint or draw.  Not surprisingly, these works did not sell until after Van Gogh died.  Even now, his later works from 1887 to 1890 are best known than his darker early works.

The point is that had Van Gogh lived longer -- even to the end of 1890, he would have sold a lot more paintings in his lifetime.  Tastes not only had changed to admire Van Gogh's wildly vivid work, but Van Gogh had changed his art in part to accommodate current tastes.

Why he chose to shoot himself when on the verge of attaining his dream of supporting himself with his art is cause for much debate.  It could be that Vincent's mental illness had progressed so far that he thought that only death was appropriate.  It could also be that Vincent enjoyed the climb up rather than the view from the top.

Image: "Head of a Peasent Woman with a White Cap" (1885)