Van Gogh Weekend

So 40 years ago, Leo Marchutz, the founder of my school here, said "Van Gogh painted a masterpiece a day, for the last 70 days of his life." So last friday, we took a field trip to try and explore how that happened. Unfortunately, in the last few months of his life, Van Gogh was in Auvers, up north, so we couldn't be where he was then, but he spent a couple very important years in Arles and Saint-Remy, which are about an hour away from Aix. So I spent the week leading up to the field trip reading a brief biography on Van Gogh, written by his sister-in-law (no pressure, Julie) and some of his letters from that period. This was the time in Van Gogh's life when he started having his crazy attacks, and really started going off the deep end, in fact Saint-Remy is the mental institution that he checked himself into after cutting off part of his ear. I've included links to a few of the paintings we were looking at, but unfortunately you might have to copy and paste them to see them. Sorry!

So we started out at 7:30 AM and headed off to Arles. When we got there, we drove to a draw-bridge over a canal that he painted. We walked to the spot Van Gogh would have done the painting had the bridge not been moved about 300 meters to avoid being wrecked, and sat down with a reproduction of the actual painting (http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lg8554+le-pont-de-langlois-arles-1888-vincent-van-gogh-poster.jpg). We then spent the next 2 and a half to 3 hours disecting exactly what Van Gogh had done. We were lucky enough to have beautiful clear blue skies, just like the ones Van Gogh most liked to paint in, and we could really see all the colors in nature. Van Gogh is known, among other things, for his use of color, and seeing the colors he found in nature compared to the actual nature itself was absolutely amazing, and really very inspiring artistically. My work since then has been a lot more adventurous with colors.

Next, we went briefly to an old roman road with tons of sarcophagi that Van Gogh painted (http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/vincent-van-gogh-paintings-from-the-yellow-house-3.jpg). We only were able to spend a small amount of time there, but, again, the colors van gogh found were all really there, and they were amazing to see in real life.

We then went to the mental hospital where he was briefly forced to live by the townspeople, and looked at yet another painting (http://wahooart.com/A55A04/w.nsf/3e75729998cde7c6c1256dd20064bdfa/842acf0a36dc59e4c1256ea7002b3fd7/$FILE/Vincent%20Van%20Gogh-Courtyard%20of%20the%20Hospital%20at%20Arles,%20The.jpg). To look at this one we got to go up onto the second floor.

Then it was time for lunch, but not before looking at one more (http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vangogh/vangogh37.html). In this painting there is a baby tree, which is now a HUGE tree. The bridge has been redone, but you can see what Van Gogh was up to. It was really cool.

For lunch we ate at the cafe Van Gogh painted in his "Night Cafe" painting.

In the afternoon, we went to Saint-Remy and spent some time looking at some more paintings in the actual location. What was amazing is that while he was there, he was largely kept inside, behind barred windows. I could never accomplish was he did behind bars. In particular, we looked at a series of three paintings done of a man cutting wheat in a field. We talked for a long time about what he had done as he painted the first, second, and third in the series, and why he had done it.

I really think the trip is going to have affected my own painting in a big way. Van Gogh's vivid colors give his paintings a kind of life that few other artists have achieved. He was adamant that it was not necessary to achieve the actual colors found in nature, but the relationships between colors. I'd love to get a chance to see some Van Gogh paintings in real life, because, according to my teachers, they'er incomparable to the reproductions. Unfortunately, almost all the good ones are in Amsterdam. So Nick and I are going to get high as balls and look at them in a week.