I miss Vincent - I miss painting - I miss blogging - I miss all of you!

Hello!

I know that I have been completely MIA after promising to faithfully paint and blog each week.  No, fear not, I am not wearing a fully sleeved and tied white jacket - I have not been that kind of committed, as Vincent was.  (And I want you all to know that I still remain very committed to this project, in the way that I described to you in my first post.)

What happened was, in today's economic climate, something of a miracle.  Three days after putting our house on the market, we had a contract.  So I have been busy preparing to move.

I am happy to report that our new space is a sunny, open, light flooded loft; we will be moving into the entire second floor of an old granite bank building in the heart of our small town's downtown district.  We had looked at it, fallen in love with it, and decided to leave things in God's hands.  I have to admit that I was surprised He would answer so quickly!

Best of all, there is a place for me to paint and to write, so I will be able to continue with the blog as soon as we have completely moved in.

This week we had the space repainted, and I was amazed at how quickly and confidently I was able choose colors - I think all of my painting and thinking so much about color (and how Vincent put hues together) really paid off - When everything is completed I will post some pictures.

Although I am not writing about Vincent, I am sure thinking about him, and contemplating what it must have been like for him to move the many times that he did during his adult life.  I plan on exploring that subject in the blog when I return to it - which I hope is sometime around the first of November.

I will extend the project to make up for the weeks I am missing; although this is a year long venture, my real commitment is to 52 paintings and 52 blogs.

Thanks to all who are continuing to read in my absence.  Feel free to make some comments and "discuss amongst yourselves..."

I have no painting for you, only pictures of some really cute little dogs...

Poco

Brio

Happy October, and I will see you all on the other side of the month.

Catherine

Camille and I play hide and seek. Vincent wins.

The Portrait of Camille Roulin is our project this week.  Thanks again to everybody who is reading along!

Camille Roulin was 11 years old at the time this portrait (one of several by VvG) was painted.  Camille was a relatively young man when he died in 1922, at 45 years of age.

I wanted to make sure that I had selected a canvas that was close in size to the original, because I thought I might have a problem if I chose a support (fancy art community word for "the thing that you are painting or drawing on") that was too big or too small.

Vincent's painting was 32.5 cm X 40.5 cm, which translates (very roughly) to 13" X 16" - the closest canvas I had to that size was 14" X 18", so that is what I used.  (Fear not, mathphobes!  This conversion was googlable.) Next, I pulled up the original portrait on the GAP, and enlarged it to be as big as my computer screen would allow.  I then hung my t-square on the top of my mac, centering it vertically on Camille's face.  I taped two small clear rulers on either side, to designate the center point of the canvas.  I then drew corresponding lines on my support, so that I would know approximately where to place the features in my pre-painting sketch.   To my surprise, I found that the center point of the image is just above the bridge of his nose, just to the left of his left eye (the eye that appears on the right side of the canvas).

That placement was not what I was expecting.  I figured that the middle of his nose would be the middle of the canvas.  I could not have been more wrong.  So, I was glad that I started by measuring.  The hat was a lot bigger than I thought it would be,  and had to be redrawn many times to get the proportion correct.  Initially, I made his face far too small, and little Camille ended up just looking like an elf in search of Christmas.  Notice at left how many times I drew and redrew his mouth, nose and chin, and just how far off I was - you can see the hint of the nose at the top of the image, and the corresponding early chin just below the lips.  I was glad that I started this in pencil, rather than the charcoal I had initially thought to use - there was a LOT of eraser sacrificed on this drawing, and, had I used charcoal, I would have ended up with a smeary mess.  Although I did spend a lot of time correcting the drawing, I think it will save me considerable effort in not having to correct the painting.

Now,  where to begin with the color?  I think, given the subject, that Van Gogh must have painted this portrait quickly.  The blue cap appears to be just two main colors of blue, with accents of black, brown, white and yellow.  The eyes are the same color of lighter blue - so, I think I will just start with two shades of blue, brown and black.

Cue Adele - it is time to paint!

As Adele agonized over her breakup, I joined in her blue mood - mixing together cobalt and light blue until I had a base shade for the cap.  I got out my trusty filbert and began to paint, roughing in the shape of the cap and leaving plenty of space for me to add in the darks.  I was trying to paint quickly and decisively, not only to emulate Vincent, but because acrylic paints, once out of the tube, can dry like cement on your palette while you are still looking for where the color should go.

I moved the brush in the direction that I thought the weave of the fabric would go as it folded over his head into the cap shape.  Therefore, most of the strokes went from the crown to the face, with a wave over the top of the skull.  At the point where the cap curved under from the top to the sides of the head, I curved the brush strokes to follow, as well.  The eyes were simple circles,avoiding the area where the pupil would go.

I kept working on the cap and the eyes, adding in some dark lines with burnt umber (a medium dark brown) and ivory black (not ivory at all, just black).  Next were the lighter blues, which I pushed into the highlighted areas of the cap.  Following VvG's painting made it both easier and more difficult - he gave me a guide as to where to put each color, but the closer I looked, the more I appreciated that it wasn't just "a couple of blues."

To make the lighter blue, I mixed in this transparent mixing white, which lightened the color without clouding it.  I will speak in a later blog post about what transparent, translucent, opaque and semi opaque mean on the outside of the paint tubes, and how and when to use and even alter these different paints.

Next, I opened up more colors: (from left to right starting at the top left) titanium white, cold grey, cadmium yellow (lemon), prussian blue, cadmium yellow medium, and ultramarine blue (red shade).  These were the colors that I thought would be the base for the colors that I would find in the hat.  You can see that I still had a bit of the original blues left.  The red is from another project - I was just reusing my palette paper.

So the hat was starting to tweed up a little bit.  I was happy with the rounded parts and wrinkles outlined by the darks on the far right, and I thought the shading was getting me where I wanted to go, but my little lines looked like swimming blobs when I compared them to Vincent's precise and so much more evocative placements.  My colors were also much more saturated (bright) than the ones on the screen, but who can be sure what the actual colors on the "real" painting are (when viewing through a computer screen)?

 As I examined Vincent's version, I saw colors that I thought I recognized - alizarin crimson on the mouth and around the left eye - burnt sienna (not burnt umber as I had guessed) on the eyebrows, and chromium oxide green on the face, eyes, and jacket.  I could also guess where VvG had intermixed these colors and others - one nice thing about the fine painting system of naming colors is that the good old basic colors have been those very same good old basic colors for hundreds of years.  This continuity of names and formulations allow us, as modern artists, to produce the same colorations as the old masters - but, again,  I suspect that the older paintings may have been somewhat altered in color (no matter how well conserved) by the march of time.

So who is to say that Camille was not bright and saturated with rich color as Vincent originally saw him on the canvas?

The blurry photo above (I was holding the camera and my paintbrush while I took the shot - lesson learned!), and somewhat less blurred image to the right show my many guesses with regard to color as I looked for Camille's face.  At this point, I was very concerned that the best I would be able to do was a portrait of a very dirty faced, crookedly smirking little boy.


 I began adding in yellows on the background, mainly to conserve my yellow paint (by using it to make progress on the canvas rather than allowing it to dry on the palette) and clean up the yellow paint that was blobbing up my brush.  With acrylics, the paint dries so quickly, that if you are not going to waste it, you have to get it up on the canvas rapidly, and sometimes that involves slapping it somewhere other than where you are doing (perhaps) fine work (such as on the face).   Vincent, who had so little money, also had a strong motivation to preserve and utilize every squeeze of his paint.  The oil paint that Vincent used (acrylics had not been invented in his lifetime) takes much longer to dry out (than acrylics), and can often be revived by the addition of more diluent (paint thinners), but once it is out of the tube, it can't really go back in.  Did Vincent start out with the sunny yellow background, then "clean his brush" with strokes on the face, or did he start with the face, then clean up his brush on the background and jacket, or did he care about this aspect at all?


 If you look really closely at the original VvG on the GAP, (image at right) you will see some very thinned very faint green strokes on the edges of the background, just above the shoulders.  It looks to me like Vincent wanted to bounce some of the green (as a reflection?) up above the jacket, and he started with bolder strokes on the right side of the painting (see right), then added very faint strokes just above the left (side of the painting as you are viewing it) shoulder. (Not pictured.)  These strokes appear to be very thin and floating on top of the yellow.  I think the addition was deliberate - I don't thing that there are many things in any of Van Gogh's works that are not... But it looks to me like he had a limited pool of that particular (probably already mixed) green left to work with and he thinned it and thinned it until he used up every molecule.

So, I kept on painting, adding stroke by stroke (not fluid, even, smooth strokes, but chopped, on and off, contoured strokes which were very challenging to do!) to the face, jacket, and hat until I got a jaundiced, cat like boy looking out at me.  Always with the good eye, Bryan pointed out that his hat looked too cut off on the right, giving him a lobotomized appearance, and that the chin was too narrow to actually hold a jaw bone.

So, I incorporated those corrections, as you can see at left.  I outlined the new edge to the cap and added to the left (side of the image) lower portion of the chin to provide more surface area.  I then filled in with the appropriate color.  Those two changes helped a lot, as did the addition of the highlights and lowlights on the jacket.  The eyes, also were not quite right, and were muddied in pools of yellow with little definition on the creases.  That was corrected with some lines of prussian blue (the ivory black was too heavy) applied with a very thin, very small brush. My final count of colors that I used in the painting was more than 20.  And I started with the premise that it was basically just four!  Four!  I would mix in a dab of this or that until I had what I thought was a match. Often it was was a match, just not to anything that Vincent had put into his painting.

  My boys' nose remained quite troublesome, and I could never get it to have the  rounded, tough guy, "future stevedore's nose" quality of Vincent's portrait.  My modern version of Camille's mouth was also a little too pretty and perfect (and by perfect, I mean not perfect); it was a great challenge to try to replicate Vincent's version.  I tried and tried to get the pursed lips right, but much of what I put on the canvas ended up looking like Jack Nicholson's Joker's mouth from the Batman movie. Before I laid down my brush, I did cover quite a bit of the yellow that I had placed around the eyes and cheeks, and that helped a lot.   Below is the finished portrait.

Is it an exact copy of Vincent Van Gogh's original?  Absolutely not.  Is it a successful painting?  An utter failure?  Somewhere in between?  You tell me.

When I finished with the painting on Friday night, I put it on a little easel that I have next to my T.V.  As I watched the late news coverage of the ugliness of the Jerry Sandusky trial and the righteous, albeit "what does it fix?" verdict, I kept on glancing over at my meta version of this sunny, adorable little boy, who was born, lived, and died, all before World War II.  Eventually, the awful Sandusky story (and all of the other stupid news, T.V. shows, gossip and snookies, hatred and hard times, and all of the other 2012 distractions)  will go away, but my painting shall live on, at least for a little while here in my house.  It made me happy to see this painting on my easel, and it made me really happy that over the next 50 weeks, I will make 50 more "Vincents" to look at and enjoy (or not - I am open to whatever the outcome of this process).

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this, and I welcome your comments - including requests for any of Vincent's paintings you would like for me to attempt.  I hope that my work this week will inspire you to make some art of your own to enjoy...

Until next week.

Catherine

I become a copy cat (herine)

The subject this week is Van Gogh's portrait of Camille Roulin

(1888, Oil on Canvas).  The GAP link follows:

http://www.googleartproject.com/collection/van-gogh-museum/artwork/portrait-of-camille-roulin-vincent-van-gogh/5783165/#

(fist bumping myself!  I figured out how to add the links!)

Camille Roulin was the middle child of VvG's postman in Arles.  At the time, mail was delivered two or more times each day, so Vincent became very familiar with his mailman, Joseph Roulin, and was friendly with Roulin's family, as well.  Vincent could not afford fees to pay models, but the Roulin family agreed to sit for him in exchange for some of the paintings that were produced.  Camille was 11 at the time this portrait was made.  I am posting a link (below) where you can find out more about the Roulin family and their relationship with Vincent, and see many of the paintings of the family that Van Gogh produced during that period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roulin_Family_(Van_Gogh_series)

That Camille Roulin - what a cutie!  With his blue eyes and jaunty cap and that impish jut of his chin, you know that Camille must have been just the kind of kid who always had ants in his pants.  Vincent captures him leaning forward, ready to spring from the chair.  What was this boy thinking about as he tried to sit still for this crazy red headed man?  Had he any idea what Vincent was doing as he smashed his sticks into colored blobs then squished the blobs together onto to a frame of stretched tablecloth?  His gaze is independent and certainly is not directed at Vincent; you wonder if he was looking at his mother or father admonishing him to try not to move.  One of the most charming aspects of his face are his lips, which are permanently pursed in an expression of being ready to blurt!

His simple green coat is accented by a single red button, and, like the clothes of many middle children, the jacket looks just a little too big for him.  The background of the portrait is a soft, lemony color, and Vincent also deploys a lot of yellow in the boyish little face.  Speaking broadly, only four major colors appear in the painting: yellow, blue, green and red.  If they sound familiar, it is because they are the primary colors - what an appropriate choice for the portrait of a child!

Unlike the clogs/velvet loafers paintings, I will attempt to copy this painting as exactly as I can.  This will be a real challenge for me because it will force me to do things that I don't really enjoy doing, like staying within the lines, and painstakingly mixing hues to match.   

Many art classes assign a project of copying an established artist's work of art.  Sometimes instructors will assign all of the students in the class the same painting, and sometimes the teachers will leave it up to the students to pick a painting from an artist that they like.  The idea behind this copying is for the students, by studying the established work closely enough to reproduce a facsimile of it, will learn at least a little bit about how the artist made the work.

My first blog post featured my student painting of a chair that I had copied from one painted by Vincent - please note the differences in the color selection (I was not trying to match exactly) and composition.

At first this seemed like stealing - the "real" artist painted it first, and copying (even loosely) a painting that someone else has already done does not seem like the most creative endeavor.

But there is a long history of established artists copying other artist's paintings, styles, techniques, subjects, and pretty much everything else there is that has to do with the making of art.  The difference is that established artists do not call this copying - they call it by many other very french sounding names like homage, Parody, Reprise, Imitation, Adaptation, Derivation, and Detournement...

(for your linking pleasure:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation_(art)

There does seem to be a line, however, which you must not cross. Those works are known by an equally frenchy sounding word: Forgery.   And, you don't need for me to tell you that this type of activity can lead to yet another word in our french vocabulary lesson - incarceration!

I started really thinking about "copying" and "homaging" and "borrowing" and "honoring" and all of the other ings involved in "recycling" other artists works when I saw an exhibit recently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  They had a gallery in their contemporary wing that was devoted to works that were "re-imaginings" of other paintings, fabric, mirrors, furniture, sculpture, photographs and all manner of weird and unusual stuff.   The atmosphere and vibe of the exhibition was absolutely thick with deja vu.

One of the pieces in that show which particularly intrigued me was (pictured at left) "Dialogue with Myself 1," 2004, by Yasumasa Morimura - When I saw the image, I immediately recognized it as an almost exact (yet really strange) replica of Freda Kahlo's "The Two Fridas," (1939) a double self portrait that she had done in response to her divorce from Diego Rivera (right).  Morimura is a Japanese artist who makes photographic replicas of famous portraits, inserting an image of himself in place of the original subject. Copy?  Homage?  Parody?  You be the judge.

What struck me was this: the idea that, what was, essentially, a copy, was hanging in a major museum along with a bunch of other copies.  That means that curators must not really think that they are copies... I think that the curators, because they chose to display them, think that these copies are a way of advancing a new layer of the idea of the original work.  These copies make the original work newly relevant for a modern audience.  I think that is an interesting thing to think about.

Feel free to divert to google images for a look at more of Morimura's work - it is really amusing!

http://www.google.com/search?q=Yasumasa+Morimura&hl=en&client=safari&rls=10_5_8&prmd=imvnsob&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=rT_iT-b6NqTU2AWd5sDvCw&ved=0CGgQsAQ&biw=1419&bih=937&sei=tD_iT5GKBab82gXLyfC_Cw

The two Fridas can be found at:

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/frida-kahlo/the-two-fridas-1939

And now a little housekeeping: In my first blog I indicated that I would be publishing the Wednesday blog by noon.  What was I thinking?  I am not a morning person, and like the owl, I hoot at night!  My new (and improved) deadline shall forever be Wednesdays at midnight.  Until I feel like changing it again.  It's my blog, so deal.

Again, thank you to those who are reading and following - I appreciate your interest!

OK, it is time to shut up and start painting!  

I try on Vincent's shoes for size

Hello, again!

The painting for this week is inspired by Vincent's "A pair of leather clogs" which, according to the Google Art Project, hangs at the Van Gogh museum in Arles.

But first, a quick detour to explore the Google Art Project (GAP). If you already know about the GAP, skip these paragraphs, but for those not yet in the know, you are about to find out about an incredible tool for artists.  The GAP has partnered with a number of great museums around the world to photograph portions of their collections for viewing by art lovers through the magical series of tubes we call the internet.

While we have been slumbering, GAP elves have gone into museums each night and photographed paths past some of the world's greatest art work, as well as deeply close up images of the the paintings, sculpture, textiles, drawings, etc. on display.  Software wizards then formatted all of this digital information into an easy to navigate "Google Maps" style program which allows anyone with a computer and access to the internet the opportunity to let their fingers do the walking through the great museums of the world.

But GAP is actually much better than just going to the museum.  When I viewed Vincent's "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I did so along with about 75 other people, with each of us jockeying for position to catch a glimpse of the surprisingly small canvas.  The closest I was able to get to the iconic painting was about 15 feet away, and my viewing experience offered very little in the way of actually connecting with Vincent's work.

When I looked up the same painting on the GAP, I was able to get out my little person icon and view the museum through her eyes - and - BEST of all - when you get to the painting, you have a close up on steroids which allows you to practically go inside!

The close up view in the GAP is SO much closer than even the best magnifying glass (if you were even allowed to get a magnifying glass that close to any museum piece, with the ever watchful "Miss, step back please.." guards...) - with the close up, you can literally dive into the painting with your eyes.  You can count the brushstrokes, see how thinly or thickly the paint was applied, find evidence of the artist's fingerprints, isolate "do overs" and so much more.

For several reasons, this super close up view is particularly useful for studying Vincent's work.  Because Vincent utilized the technique of optical blending of the colors in his work, you can see for yourself exactly the weird color choices he made; zooming in and out from individual colors to the the masterful blends of the finished works.  You can also see how (and guess why) he built up the paint (impasto) to be thicker in some areas (like the stars) and, even on some canvases, how he left blank spots where you can see the stretched linen with no paint on it at all.

These close up views allow the us to think carefully (and without someone hustling us along to the next gallery) about the choices that Vincent and other artists made in their work, which liberates us to make our own choices, which in turn, liberates us to make art.

(There will be more later about the GAP, as it is simply to awesome to describe in one blog... In the meanwhile, go look at the GAP for yourself - find your favorite artist, museum or genre and go to town!)

Many thanks to whoever it was at Google who devised and green-lighted the Google Art Project. Thanks also to the GAP elves, who keep everything going.  Your work is helping me to become an artist. Thanks!

So, now it is time for me to shut up and start painting.  Please feel free to paint along... There will be more next Tuesday.

Van Gogh was Committed, now I am, too.

Hi!

My name is Catherine, and I am trying to become an artist.  Lately, I have been reading a lot about one of my favorite artists, Vincent Van Gogh.  If you are reading this sentence, then I suppose you may be interested in Van Gogh, as well.

Catherine

You probably already know a lot about Vincent.  He painted many famous and beautiful paintings, including "The Sunflowers," "Irises," "The Starry Night" and many others.  He also cut off his ear, spent time in an asylum, and his death at age 37 was ruled a suicide.

But mainly Vincent painted.  Obsessively, purposefully, and in a way that still grabs ordinary, every day people by the collar and makes them feel something about what it means to be a human being in this world.

In the last two and a half years of his life, Vincent produced 465 paintings.

That means that for 912 1/2 sustained days - day in and day out -  Vincent was painting (on average) a complete painting (in less than) every two days.  And these were brilliant paintings, considered by many to be the best and most creative work of his life.

Keep in mind that this was at a time prior to the ease of  modern life - when Vincent wanted to paint a country scene, he had to physically walk out in the country, carrying all of the equipment he needed to paint.  He did not have the convenience of easy to clean up acrylic paints, or well equipped Art Supply websites with next day delivery.  There were no Starbucks to stop by for an icy latte to cool him as he painted in the hot sun; and even something as simple as washing flicked paint off of his trousers must have been a challenge we cannot even estimate...

But Vincent painted and drew and made art like he was on a deadline -

Which, in a way, he was.

As I said, I am trying to become an artist.  This blog is really my first public admission of that fact; and I am admitting it here, because I am hoping that, through this blog and the Vincent Project, I can commit to painting as Vincent did.

Well, sort of like Vincent did.  I know I can't do a painting every two days, even with acrylics and Fed Ex.  So I am going to produce and write about a painting a week for a year.

I am going to go through Vincent's catalogue of work and try to copy one of his paintings each week.  Some I will copy closely, trying to work out what colors and techniques he used, and some I will reinterpret in my own fashion, by just adopting the theme or color scheme or whatever interests me about Vincent's work into my own.

Each week, I plan to document my painting process by photographing my work, and I will post these photos on the Vincent Project blog.  I plan to write a little each week about my painting - the failures and successes (if any); and I will let you know if one of my ears falls bloodied to the floor during the next 12 months.

I will also upload each finished (or unfinished) painting, which I will post by midnight (CST) every Tuesday.  I will announce the new painting I will be working on each (following)Wednesday by noon.

Although Vincent painted often in isolation and with very little recognition of his effort, I am hoping that the Vincent Project will become a forum for the discussion of art and art making, and that whoever is reading this will consider painting (or drawing or working in pastels, or whatever you want to do) along with me.  I am hoping the rest of you will be able to post your own work, as well as any thoughts or insights you have about the work or the blog or both.

Well there it is.

Catherine

PS - I will be selecting images to copy from books, the google art project (www.googleartproject.com) and from the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (www.vangoghmuseum.nl).  If I can post the images in the blog, I will do so; if not, I will direct you to a link so you can locate them yourself.  The Van Gogh museum is also an excellent resource for historical and personal information about Vincent's life, if you are interested.

I also want to thank my family, especially my husband, for their support of this project.  Thanks!

I have posted a photo of the painting (assigned in an informal painting class) that started this below.  On the left (from a book) is Vincent's chair; on the right is mine.

Please feel free to share this with anyone whom you think may be interested in reading it.