Vincent and I discuss volunteerism. The world wins.

First of all, welcome new followers, I hope you will enjoy reading along as Vincent does his best to try and teach me how to paint - I cannot begin to express my thanks to Sonya at The Vincent van Gogh Gallery, who posted a link to the blog on their facebook page.  I woke up this morning and was absolutely gobsmacked to find that I had more than 100 views on the blog - and that was just in an hour of it being up on the Gallery's page!

There were also many facebook likes and shares - thank you all for liking what I am doing - just thank you!! (I am genuinely humbled, thrilled, validated, encouraged, grateful, gobsmacked!!)

Now, on to this week's painting:

About 3 weeks ago, my sister, Chris, (of Harry and David/Chris and David fame) was honored by being named as the Katy (Texas) Chamber of Commerce volunteer of the year.  Chris well deserves this recognition because she works pretty much (more than) full time as an advocate for her community - she volunteers for the annual festivals and other events, she has served on the school board, she mentors  children in the school system, and she serves as the President of her School District's Education Foundation.  She also sews costumes for school plays, organizes fundraisers, sings (and plays the drums and organizes costumes and props) in multiple community choirs, and pretty much does whatever good works people ask of her.

Although she was licensed to practice law before her children were born, Chris never went back to a full time legal practice.  Instead, she devoted her time to raising two wonderful kids, looking after our aging mom, and doing everything she could to improve whatever community (Houston, Anchorage, Jakarta, Aberdeen, McKinney and Katy) she was planted in.  

I wanted to do a painting for Chris that would serve to commemorate her being honored by the Chamber, and I thought it was really important that the subject be one that would be relevant to what the award was all about.  As I leafed through Vincent's catalogue, I kept noticing depcitions of sowers.  For our non agrarian readers, a sower is a farm laborer who scatters seeds on farmland so that the crops can grow.  This occupation seems to me to be one of the most optimistic ways that one can spend their life.  To be a sower of seeds, one must have extraordinary faith - faith that the sun will shine, the rains will come at the right time, and fall in the right amount, and that there will be people on the other end of the season to harvest, cook, and be sustained by the labor of the autumn or spring.  

To be a sower of seeds sounded to me a little like what Chris had been doing, and, for that matter what all volunteers all over the world do every day.  Most volunteer efforts are not conducted in a big, photogenic life or death situation (of course, the folks who step in after a hurricane or earthquake are doing extremely important work, and they are, indeed sowing the seeds of future rebuilding); but most volunteer efforts are conducted in small, tiny increments of daily interaction and infinitesimal pushes forward.

Many volunteers do not ever know, in a definitive, measurable way, if what they are doing is really making a difference.  They just have faith that their efforts will mean something later; that further down the line, what they are doing will be appreciated, and will, in whatever way, big or small, make the world a better place.

Hmmm.... this sort of sounds like somebody I know...

Even though Vincent wanted desperately to be recognized as a successful commercial artist, his effort during the 10 years that he was painting went largely ignored and was almost completely unrewarded.

In spite of that....

Vincent painted because he wanted to express the good he saw in the world.

Vincent kept painting, because it was better than doing nothing, and it was better than sinking into his illness.

While painting, Vincent never punched a clock or had a boss breathing down his neck to perform; he just showed up every day, ready to work with his canvas, brushes, and a new idea.

Only one person ever paid Vincent for a painting.

The Red Vineyard at Arles, the only painting Vincent sold in his lifetime.

Vincent had faith that what he was doing, one day, would make a difference in the way that people saw art, and in turn, saw the world.

To me, that is what volunteering is all about.  You keep doing it even if nobody notices.  You progress in your efforts, and don't expect a big hoopla.  You realize that in your own way (big or small or somewhere in between) you are changing the world for the better.

So kudos to Chris, and kudos to all of the volunteers all over the world.  Let us all make our own butterfly effect - you may never know how you changed the world; the only thing you can be sure of is that you tried...

So onto the painting:

As I mentioned, The Sower was a subject the Vincent returned to again and again.  He painted many farm scenes depicting the complete spectrum of seasonal activities, and (if you look above), you can see the people in the vineyard are busily reaping the fruits of seeds that had been sown.

Vincent himself had copied many works from another great painter of agrarian life in Europe, Jean-Francois Millet.  

Millet's original

Above is Millet's original The Sower, painted in 1850.  While staying at his parent's house in 1881, Vincent copied Millet's painting in an ink sketch.

Vincent's copy

You can check out some of the other Sowers that Vincent drew and painted; it is interesting to see exactly how he progressed with working and reworking a single subject.  

In fact, Vincent did so many studies of the subject, that he became a little obsessive about it.  In their book, Naifeh and White Smith describe the situation with this quote from Vincent:

"II have been longing to do a sower for such a long time," he lamented as he watched the harvest finish in Arles, "but [it] never comes off.  And so I am almost afraid of it." 

The authors then describe the depths of Vincent's struggle with the subject - (Vincent) "thrust himself deeper into the image (of the sower) with a vision of Christ as a 'great artist' who spread the light-filled art of redemption just as the striding figure in the field spread the seeds of rebirth.  'what a sower,' he exclaimed, 'what a harvest!' ...he painted a strange, impossible self-portrait depicting himself on... the path to eternity - striding confidently and shouldering his load of sketchpads, canvases, pens and brushes: the seeds of his new faith. 'I consider making studies like sowing,' he once said. '[and] I long for a harvest time'."

Wow.  There is a lot of information about Vincent's relationship to Millet, and I encourage you to explore that - it is fascinating reading, and my own effort in reading up on this subject has been well worth my time.

The version of The Sower that I decided to paint for Chris was one that Vincent completed in 1888.

I have always loved this painting; looking at it has always made me feel the warmth of the sun on my back and the satisfaction of the finish of a long day's work.  Vincent painted several versions of this same scene; google images will show you his working and reworking of the subject, along with many other artist's attempts to replicate the scene.

I did my painting directly from one published in the Ingo F. Walther book on Van Gogh (I got mine in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble, that pretty much started this whole project...).  The composition of the painting I used was the same, but the coloration was markedly different than in the painting you see above.

You can see my book and the painting in progress at left; the color differences between my book and the one you see above should be apparent.

I also printed off (with my new, color printer, thanks ArtDemigod!) two different  google images versions of the painting to work with.





Instead of helping, all of these versions did, in fact, make the process more confusing... throughout the painting process I kept having to remember which version I was using.

You can see at right that I started with a sketch (on a canvas covered student board, divided pizza style).  I was having problems drawing a perfect round circle for the sun until I remembered that highball glasses have two purposes - they're not just for holding cocktails, they are also useful for those who refuse to look through their drawer to find a compass.

You can see the center of my canvas where all of the lines intersect - once again, Vincent nailed the composition, putting the floral spray on the tree dead center.

At right is the semi finished drawing.

I love the way that we are looking at the figure, but thanks to the light of the setting sun, we cannot see his face...

By obscuring the face, Vincent allows each of us to be the sower, and, (I'd like to think) Christ-like in our own way.

And now with some tweaks (redrawing of the position of the head, adjusting the position of the legs and hands, further defining the bag) I am ready to begin painting.  I start with some dark lines in my most favorite not quite black, Payne's Gray.

You can see at right that I have all of my versions lined up around my canvas as I begin the painting - note how green the sky is in the version at the top, and how, in each of the versions, it is difficult to tell exactly what we are looking at: fields, a river, clouds, striations in the sky, etc.

OK, I have almost all of my dark outlines (cloisonne) painted in; note how I left the flowers, sky and sun in pencil for now.

I then filled in the tree with a variety of browns, both opaque and translucent.  While I a paint, I am trying to remember the way the light from the sun would be hitting everything, until I take a really close look at Vincent's work(s), which seems, in some cases, to break the bathed in sunlight during the golden hour visual rules.

Once again, I got carried away painting and forgot to take photos.  I was painting in a careful way, until I literally stopped, set down my brush, and typed the word TURBULENCE out on my word pad.  I printed it out in an attention grabbing color and chose a font that looked as turbulent as possible.

TURBULENCE!!! (see cypress tree posting if you do not understand this...)

OK, so here is the sky and sun...

and more sun and sky...

In this blue "uniform" it looks like my worker is a member of the communist party...

Has my turbulence sign resulted in any improvement?

You can see above that I was trying to go at least a little crazy with the color.  This part was actually really fun, making the pointillist dots in competing colors.  That said, I have miles to go before he sleeps...

I kept on playing with it, adding to it, working and reworking the color.

First the sky was much more orange...

then yellow, with bright orange flowers....

at right it is much deeper green and much later in the evening...

until at left, I turned back the hands of time and pushed the sun back upward with more oranges in the field and less depth in the shadowy areas...

I just kept playing and playing - it was like running your dvr forward and backward on the same scene....

Here are some close ups of the work...

The flowers, sun and face...

the little farm and trees way in the background....

More flowers...

a darker sower...

and one that is lightened back up...

a sky that has been re-yellowed...

then re-oranged...

until finally, I am either exhausted and done or satisfied and done or some combination of the two.

Note the reworking of the tree trunk... the Art Demigod advised a thinning and moving to the left - what do you think?

I do dig the electric blues, as always!

Because this would be a gift, I wanted to frame it, and the only frame I had on hand that fit the canvas was a matte white fancy frame.

Initially, I thought the white might work, but when I got them together, the combination made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

I decided I would need to get a different frame or paint the one that I had...

but before I could even think about that, I kept on finding other tweaks to add to the painting...

So I kept on fussing with it, taking it in and out of the frame with each stopping point... until I saw something else...

I painted the frame with a bronzy gold color

(hoping it would dry in time to meet Chris and give it to her later that day... it did, but I forgot to get a picture of the framed painting ... perhaps Chris will post a comment and a link...)

And here, unframed, is the final painting that I gave to my sister, Chris Crockett, the Katy Chamber of Commerce Volunteer of the Year!

Again, my thanks to everyone who is reading this, my volunteer effort.  I appreciate your interest, and I hope that you have enjoyed reading about my painting as much as I have enjoyed making it.

I have already begun working on a large scale painting after Vincent's The Irises...

The Real Deal

My work in progress

See ya next time, and keep painting!

Catherine