Vincent and I discuss Andy Warhol. Andy pees on a painting.

Throughout his very brief career, Vincent Van Gogh painted a number of self portraits, chronicling an ever evolving and conciously imperfect human being.  He  chose himself so often as a subject because he wanted to paint a person, and did not have the money to pay models or have many friends who were willing to sit for him.  There was always a man in his mirror, though, and that man lives on as his most frequently painted portrait subject.

At left is a quick sketch of Vincent that I painted (on an envelope that I used to mail out some information about the blog) this week.  It is based on the portrait you see (at right) below.



Art historians have long celebrated Vincent's lack of access to models, because the 34 (more or less) self portraits that he produced tell a very human and intimate story of his life.

But are his faces the only autobiography that Vincent left behind?  Absolutely not.

The letters he wrote provide a comprehensive, chronologically ordered story in which Vincent describes his location, his feelings, his dreams and disappointments, and the specific ideas that he was thinking about at any given moment.

In their own way, his other paintings are autobiographical as well.  His landscapes capture the mise en scene of Vincent's world: the architecture of Northern Europe at the time that he lived there, the dress and habits of the common individuals that populate his paintings, and the pastoral and urban environments where he worked.

The flower pictures and other still lifes also tell their own tales - the  sunflower paintings that Vincent did arguably encapsulate Vincent's thoughts on birth, life, death and rebirth, and his many celebrated portraits of (mostly his own) shoes are an intimate travelogue, revealing a life lived not as a tourist, but as an expatriate.



Vincent's depictions of shoes are almost painfully intimate.  Upon viewing the ones shown above, I felt  as if I had walked (uninvited and unwelcome) into the wearer's bedroom.  The rendering of the humble, worn boots was done so masterfully that as my eyes scanned the subject, I could feel the smooth, clammy lining with the sole of my own foot and the brush of the ticklish leather tops on my calves.

With only the briefest glance, the painting lets us know exactly how Vincent felt about walking, and hard work, and the worth of a man.  Those boots describe not only Vincent's values, but what he valued, as well.  The warm yellow atmosphere in the painting elevates the humble subject, bathing the cool black boots in a golden, almost heavenly aura.  Without so much as a single word, Vincent's painting is a lesson on economics, the importance of a work/rest balance, and populism.

Many articles and scholarly papers have been written about Van Gogh's shoe paintings and their place in our cultural history.  Vincent's elevation of such a humble object was an important advancement in the continuum of artistic discovery, and it was his still lifes of shoes that brought us (at least in part) to the pop art movement in the 1960's.


A can of Campbell's soup was, without question, one of the most humble and ubiquitous things in America when Andy Warhol exploded onto the mid century Art scene by creating paintings featuring their soup cans with the iconic red, white and gold label.  He also produced paintings of other humble objects, including Coca Cola bottles and dollar bills.

But what you may not know about Andy Warhol is that he started with shoes.

After earning a BA in Graphic Design, Warhol began a career as a commercial artist, illustrating for magazines, advertisers, and others with commercial interest in his work.  He created illustrations for companies as diverse as RCA and Tiffany and Company, and was hired in the mid 50's as chief illustrator for I. Miller, a shoe manufacturer headquartered in New York.

Below are some examples of his work for that company, which often included humorous or cryptic captioning of the illustration.








As you can see, almost all of the shoe illustrations featured above are of ladies shoes, which would be expected of an artist doing advertising illustrations for a women's shoe company.  (The blue brogues were fanciful depictions of Andy's own shoes, and were as iconic a signature (of him) as was his blonde wig.)  Accented with bows, flowers, and dainty heels, the Warhol shoes are definitely meant to be worn by a lady of leisure.  Even the brogues don't look very walkable, with their exaggerated toe box and delicate color.

How do Andy's shoes look next to Vincent's?



Do they look like they could be invented by or even used by the same species?

Andy's shoe is beautiful: a delicate, impossible work of art.  Vincent's shoes are realistic, utilitarian works of, well, work.

Compare the razor thin sole of the shoe on the right with the thick, hobnailed, indestructible soles on the left.  Notice the thick leather uppers of Vincent's shoes, next to the almost lacey velvet of Andy's.  Vincent's shoes are unlined and meant to be worn with dense, warm socks, while Andy's shoe is delicately faced in kid, and meant to be worn (if at all) with the sheerest silk stocking.

Vincent's shoes, like new F-150 tires, still have a lot of mileage left on them.  Andy's shoedometer is most assuredly at zero.  We all know that if we turned Andy's shoe over, there would not be a mark on the bottom of it except a delicately incised number 6.

The only context for Andy's shoe are his words: Shoe of the evening, beautiful shoe. Vincent's boots, in comparison, seem to be kicked off and dumped next to the straw bed of their snoring wearer, illuminated only by the candle he was too tired to extinguish.

The purple shoe is exclusively an object of beauty, and is never meant to be worn (it is no accident that there is only one of them), while the boots look so broken in that they have conformed exactly to their wearer's spread toes and the odiferous and fungal cracks in his aching heels.

Both of these images are so successful, that, with only a glance, we can smell each of the illustrations.

So what's the point of comparing these shoes?  Because each of these images tells us a compelling and important story about the artist behind them.

Vincent spent his life desperately wanting to be known intimately by another person.  He was rejected over and over; first by his mother, then by a handful of women that he had awkwardly tried to woo.  Vincent knew that he was a boor, and spent a lot of time and energy apologizing for his many faux pas; he knew that he would never have the smooth, persuasive people skills that made his brother, Theo so successful.  The more Vincent tried to get anyone to like him, the more they bullied, humiliated and rejected him.

Andy, on the other hand, focused his adult energy on keeping his many hangers on at arm's length.  Despite his professed shyness and non conformist manner, Andy was popular and adored, working hard to center himself squarely in the middle of the thriving New York Art Scene.  But he did not want to be "traditionally" admired.  He wanted to make the world take notice and admit that he was everything that they (the right people - celebrities, art critics, the cultural watchdogs) wanted him to be, and so much more.



Andy didn't mind engaging in boorish behavior, which he did not see as a social risk, but rather participated in to increase his status.  The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a lovely, coppery, verdigris painting on display (left) [just a few floors above some of the most iconic, historic and revered revolutionary period paintings in the United States] which Warhol "painted" by standing in a circle with his friends while they all urinated on a canvas primed with a metallic pigment.

I have seen it for myself, and I have to tell you, it really is beautiful, but it was created by a person who  probably did not care a hoot what I would have thought.

I cannot imagine Vincent even conceiving of such a project.  Even drunk. With a canvas dropped rightside up on the floor below him and layered with metallic paint. And an extremely full bladder.  With his trousers around his knees.  While drinking a cup of coffee. Vincent wanted to be liked way too much to participate in such an action.

Andy wanted to be liked too much not to.

So that brings us back to the shoes.  All of Vincent's shoes are portrayed in a way that is so painfully, heartbreakingly human, and Andy's shoes are presented with no more intimacy than we would feel in looking a copy of Vogue.

Andy's shoes were rendered only after a deal had been struck for payment.  Vincent's shoes were done probably to use up leftover paint and avoid wasting money.

Andy painted Shoes, Christmas Cards and Record Jackets to get the money and recognition that would allow him to retreat into a world populated only by people who were interesting to him; Vincent painted everything with the faint hope that maybe, one day, if his paintings were accepted, it would allow him to enter a world where he would be interesting to others.

Don't get me wrong.  I am in love with all of these shoe paintings.  They are each exactly perfect, because every painting does such an amazing job of communicating to us the context in which the artist lived.  These men did not need to speak, or tweet, or post things on Facebook - what they made did their talking, and it tell us volumes about  Art, Commerce, Women, Men, Society (both low and high), Culture, Value, Social Norms and Deviance, and, most of all, Power.

I dare say that Andy could not have happened without Vincent's laying some groundwork for him, and Vincent could not have survived ten minutes in Andy's world before being squashed like an insect.

You only have to look at their bodies of work to know that both men were important, groundbreaking, and visionary artists.  I am glad to get to know each of them.

And now, for something completely different (than the great art and artists we were just discussing), I shall paint a still life of my own shoes:

These Beverly Feldman booties carried me all over Manhattan about ten years ago.  In them, I saw (for the first time!) Vincent's The Starry Night, enjoyed the hell out of all the big shows on Broadway, ate in some of the best NYC restaurants, and walked arm in arm with my three favorite guys in the world.  You could not pay me enough to actually wear a heel that high today, but I keep on keeping them in my closet because I can't bear to give away something that holds so many memories for me.  Yes, they are completely impractical, uncomfortable, and impossible to walk in!  Yes, I did really wear them.  With no Taxis.  In December.

And with that in mind, I thought a painting of this outrageous yet very real pair of booties might be the perfect bridge (shoe) between Andy and Vincent.

I start with a charcoal sketch, which I erase with a paper towel and redraw.

I added in the flowers, which on the actual booties are embroidered in silk thread on beautiful black suede.

The heels are very thin and made of what looks like shiny plastic.

In the sketch, which I did on a primed, stretched 16" X 20" canvas, I used a charcoal stump (at left), which I sharpened to a point by just rubbing it on a scrap piece of paper.  You can see below about how big my piece of charcoal was.

Once I was done with the sketch, I started filling in with some acrylic, (below) trying to match the actual colors of the embroidered flowers on the shoes.

Like Vincent must have, I was using up the leftover paint on my magic pallette - the mistake I was making was in using up all of the translucent and transparent paints from the end of the dogwood painting - you can see for yourself what poor coverage I was getting in my effort to economize.

Here is a little close up of the flowers and leaves.  Yup.  They're translucent, all right.

Time is money.  Or not.

I am mixing up some of the pinks for the many peachy/pinky flowers that are on the boots.

First some crimson, then titanium white.

Gee, this is sure looking familiar...

Where have I seen it before?

Ahh, Crap on a stick!  More pork cutlets!!  (see dogwood blog posting...)

Yep. Pork.

Perhaps painting in some of the background of the bootie will make this seem less like Groundhog's Day...






Applesauce, anyone?

I do like the red flowers, though.

At this point, the Art Demigod comes home and asks why I am doing more pork chops.  I think you can guess that I had not started dinner (I thought it was his turn to cook).

There was nothing left to do except reject Vincent's exacting realism in favor of Andy's avant guarde thinking.

The pork is banished from my palette forever! (Or at least until I do another caucasian portrait; it's not just the other white meat, it's also the white person flesh tone....)

You can see above that I have darkened the flowers that were translucent/transparent with the proper, opaque colors.  I have also sketched in some flooring, baseboard and a wall... I am imagining that these shoes got kicked off in a hotel bathroom just before a lovely soak in the tub.

In the image below, I have added the finishing touches on the flowers (embroidered satin stitches and french knots), and am starting to paint in the wall and tile floor.

Some close ups of the flowers; you can see that the cobalt blue one above has the orange stitches but not the light blue ones; the one at right has both.

I tried to make the flower colors "vibrate" by using accent colors that were the opposite of the field colors.

At left I have added more to the background, as well as some shadows underneath the shoes.




Below is a close up of the suede highlights, the seaming of the  booties and the flowers.

More close ups, at left (toes),

At right (heel),

and left again, the ankle of the upright bootie.

And here is the finished painting!

Please let me know what you think.  Thank you all for reading along; it has been my pleasure to do the painting and write the blog.  I hope that I am inspiring some of you to paint along with me, or, if you are not a painter, to be making whatever kind of art you like to make!

Have a good week.

Catherine

I begin with a black velvet painting...

Hello again!

First of all, I would like to thank all those who have viewed and subscribed to this blog - your support is so encouraging!

And now, on to this week's project, "A pair of leather clogs".

I could see that Vincent had been inspired by a pair of well worn, hard working and obviously typical peasant shoes.  The shoes look comfortable and ready to slip right on, or as if they had just been kicked off at the end of a good day's work.  As you would expect, Vincent did an excellent job conveying the contours of the leather as it conformed to the wearer's feet, and the shoes are firmly rooted onto the floor with a strong shadow to the right of each.  With just some simple brushstrokes and variations in tone, Vincent captured the interior and exterior textures of the shoe's leather.  The heels depicted in the painting look appropriately worn down and scuffed in all of the places that you would expect.

With that in mind, for this week's project, I was inspired by Vincent's Clogs to paint some well worn, hard working shoes that had belonged to my son, Duncan.

Like Vincent's clogs, Duncan's shoes were working shoes, and he had logged many miles on his feet while wearing them.  Duncan's shoes also had seen hard service - they had been stepped upon, and were scuffed and broken in so hard that they were in danger of becoming broken out.  I know he had worn them in all kinds of conditions day in and day out for as long as it took him to get done with his high school job, which required a lot of standing.

However, unlike Vincent's clogs, which were made of sturdy leather, Duncan's shoes were made of black velvet.  Duncan's working shoes were the tuxedo loafers that he wore as a singer in his high school choir.

The "velvets," as he came to call them, became Duncan's favorites the moment he realized that they were made with tennis shoe technology hidden inside very standard looking, hard soled formal shoes.  Those shoes, he claimed, could be worn all day or night (or both) with nary a pinch.  The velvets carried him to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and more, and in them, Duncan sang his way into one of the top college vocal programs.

But even the velvets had limits.  After two years of tramping all around cities, climbing risers and being tossed wet or dusty (or both) into suitcases, the velvets were starting to come apart.  The stitching on the sides was starting to unravel, and the tongues of the shoes were curling and shrinking like an old apple collapsing in upon itself.  The soles were  nearly transparent, and the toes no longer met the ground, but instead had started to stretch, jester-like, toward Duncan's knees.

I don't know why Vincent chose to paint the clogs, but I figure it was because he wanted to honor both the sturdy, well made shoe and the wearer (Vincent himself?) who shaped them.  I wanted to do the same by trying to capture for Duncan these shoes which had meant so much to him.

I started with a "cartoon" of the shoes, which I did in charcoal on a cotton covered artist's panel.
Charcoal is nice because it is easy to erase by smudging it with a paper towel, but it can be a challenge if you are painting initially with light color, as it will bleed into your paint.

So I could refer to both the original and my own photograph as I painted, I also set up the project on my computer, which I can see easily from my easel.  The image on the left is the screen from the Google Art Project (GAP) which was discussed in last week's blog.  Duncan's shoes were captured with the camera on my iphone.

I set up my palette with the paints that I thought I would need to get started.  For this painting (and all of the other paintings I will do for the Vincent Project) I used Artist Grade (heavy body) acrylic paint.  (The "heavy body" just means that there is more pigment suspended in the acrylic than in a student grade paint.)

Because I wanted to paint in the rapid fire Van Gogh style, I was generous with the amounts of paint I squeezed out of the tubes, but I (thought I had...) limited the color selection initially.  The charcoal cartoon led me to begin with the darks, so I started with  black, purple and blue, filing in the dark sides and the tops of the shoes.

I kept the right sides of both shoes clean, because I knew that I wanted to add in the highlights that would, hopefully, make for a convincing "velvet in a spotlight" texture.

I used two of my favorite types of brushes on this painting, a filbert and a shader.

The filbert, on the right, is cut so that it is arched on the top and the bristles meet in the middle like the edge of a knife.  This brush is excellent for filling in with precise control.  Just below is the shader, which is like a tiny, long-handled angled-edge house painting brush.  And I typically use it just like a house painting brush - to cut in along edges.  It can also be used for creating shadows.

I try to start with the smallest brush I think will do the job - the smaller the brush is, the easier it is to control.  I also try to start with my newest brushes when I need precision - older brushes can be ornery at times.  But enough about equipment - now back to the painting!



I proceeded by adding in the lights - including not only whites and creams, but also light blues, violets and silvers.   I then roughed in the shadows, checking to make sure that they were opposite where the source of light was coming from (the upper left corner of the painting).  The magnificently lit right interior sidewalls of the shoes were painted with authority and confidence - and of course, (look back up at it now...) they were painted completely wrong -

I wanted to contrast the coolness of the tones on the uppers with some warm colors on the lining; I painted these in, trying to mimic VvG's broken line technique, which is MUCH harder to do than it looks.

The background was next.  Again, I was trying to paint in the VvG style, with directional brushstrokes that added texture and color to fool the eye into thinking that there was a flat floor beneath the shoes.

What I did not think about was checking back on the VvG painting to see the color choices he had made.

 In Vincent's original, the tone of the shoes was very close to the tone of the floor, which was very close to the tone of the wall behind.  Although it appears that many colors were selected for his painting (and really, there are), the image could be described as mainly ochre, moss, black and cream.

I, on the other hand, went radically off of the reservation here.  I had some awesome bright colors on the table, and dang it, I was going to USE them!

This color selection by the "whim of a mad woman" contributed a cascade of problems with my painting.

First, the warmly colored background was too close in color to the linings of the shoes, which gave the effect of the bodies of the shoes "floating" without any lining or soles.  I changed that to a more camouflaged color scheme, which was slightly closer in color to the actual caramel color of the lining (but ended up just looking like bad, well used carpet pad, I think).

Another problem was the cushiony part of the lining of the shoe was black, which was very close in tone to the (now corrected) interior sidewall of the shoe in the painting.  

My husband pointed out an additional issue - the cushion showed only in the left shoe; the one in the right shoe was (in actuality) obscured by the right sidewall of that shoe.  He said that my leaving out the right shoe pad (that I could not see) resulted in left shoe pad looking like nothing more than a shadow, with no corresponding shadow shown in the right shoe.  Stay tuned for the resolution: This will be corrected in the final image by my finally just going with the flow, and slapping a shadow directly on that left shoe pad!  Sometimes a second pair of eyes and a loose attitude about exact accuracy is very helpful...

Next, I shifted the lining from khaki to blue, just to keep it contrasting from the very warm red floor I had laid down.  I made the wall blue for much the same reason, just to lay cool on top of the warm.  None of these decisions actually enhanced the painting, but it was a struggle to figure out what to do.  I asked myself again and again, "what would Vincent do?"  Well, obviously, Vincent chose a more cohesive color scheme in the first place.  (Or maybe in the second or third or fifth or twenty fifth place - we will never know...)

What I finally went back to was Vincent's unified color scheme and simple composition.  Worn shoes on an appropriate floor.  Simple.  I spent some time thinking about where it was - exactly - that Duncan's shoes were.  I had taken the photo with them sitting on my dining room table.  This was done because the light was good there, but painting the velvets on the table did not seem particularly appropriate, and my apologies to any future dinner guests with regard to this potentially unsavory revelation...

Taking Vincent's direction, I laid down a lot of grays, blacks, creams, whites and dark neutrals to try to get the floor color moving closer to the color of the shoes.  I decided that the shoes were on the stage floor of the high school auditorium, which, in my mind, made it OK that there was a lot of wildly colored paint still peeking out of the dark neutrals.  I kept on adding more browns, blues and grays until I got it pretty dark, but it still looked odd.

I repainted the wall an institutional paste color (pretty much the color of the actual auditorium), and let the underlying greenish blue bleed through in parts.

These were only minor improvements. (Which I, unfortunately, failed to photograph - sorry)

Then it hit me.  If the light was falling on the right side of the shoes, then the light had to be falling in the same way on the floor!

I got out a new paint that I had purchased but had no idea how to use - It was called interference blue.

On my finger, it looked very light, shimmery, and was a purply/pinky/very light violet color.











I had some old paint on my palette and tried a dab of the interference blue on red, brown, blue, and a black/grey/blue mixture.  On the red, brown and blue, it dried looking much like what was on my finger:

(The samples look much more iridescent in the photos than they do on the actual red and brown paint blobs - upper right - and the blue paint streak below.)

But on the black/grey/blue mixture, the interference turned a brilliant, sparkly blue - it was the color of some fireworks; shimmery, electric and crackling with light!

And that lovely, weird, iridescent paint just might turn out to be the solution to my problem.  That shimmer could be the effect I needed to convey strong light without looking washed out or dull.  So, I pushed the interference to come from the imaginary direction of the light on the shoes, and then darkened (with a thin wash of more gray and blue) the opposite side of the painting.

So now, I'm calling it done, or, as Duncan would phrase it: Doneski!

Please let me know what you think - of the painting, the blog, the experience that you have had in reading this, or anything else that is on your mind.  Please also share this with anyone you think may be interested in reading it.  I have certainly enjoyed both the painting and the writing, and am excited to continue on with the next 51 weeks of "The Vincent Project."

Tune in tomorrow for the announcement of next week's subject, along with a discussion on why it is actually OK to copy the work of other artists (or is it?).