Vincent van Gogh

Short note on making

(personal reminder) “Culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated.” Makoto Fujimura ‘Cultivating the garden?!’, ‘what antiquated nonsense’, you might say … ‘Isn’t it all supposed to be gender-race-political-eco-art these days?’ And of course: If these…

Roses

reading up & sketching down; roses in art (cont.) Vincent van Gogh: Still Life: Vase with Roses (1890) Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) is more famous for sunflowers, irises and blazing cherry blossom: but still his pale roses, incandescent against a pale green wall, is amongst my favorites. The flowers are in bright, exuberant bloom, their furled forms animated by…

«I mostly think of my work as a painting»

Not being convinced that art is therapy, I will again turn my mind to the study of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis – representing a work of art in a literary language – makes explicit the connection between visual art and literature. So lets start with a little excerpt from an interview Kevin McNeilly made with the Canadian author Anne Carson KM:…

what do we talk about –

– when we talk about beauty? Here is a question for you: Is it at all possible to talk about beauty as a defined or delimited concept? Let me show you some examples of art usually described as beautiful. Do these works have a common quality of any sorts – a quality which could be…

… art as therapy?!

What is art for? It’s a difficult question, a question we tend to ignore in the sphere of contemporary art and theory. We, the establishment, find it rather naïve to ask such a blunt question. We are sometimes very unsure of ourselves as artist (why am I doing this? Am I good enough?? etc.), but…

Van Gogh painted the beautiful Almond Blossom (1890) as a gift for his nephew Vincent Willem. The painting belongs to a series of blossoming almond trees made between 1888-90. It is easy to retrace van Gogh’s Japanese inspiration in this work. The painting is full of light & joy I started right away to make…

Vincent’s bookshelf

Have a look at this beautiful post: Vincent’s bookshelf. Vincent van Gogh, Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book (1888) * * *

First steps

Vincent van Gogh was greatly influenced by the French J-F Millet. So much so that he copied several of his artworks. It is very interesting to see how true van Gogh is to the original, yet he also manages to make his own version into something totally new, very van-gogh’ish … First Steps, after Millet, Vincent…