art for all

27. Vinnie's Balls

May 05, 2021 Danny Gregory Season 2 Episode 26
art for all
27. Vinnie's Balls
Show Notes Transcript

Let's explore the many ways Vincent van Gogh is inspiring and educational for self-taught artists like me and my pals at Sketchbook Skool.



welcome to art for all the sketchbook school podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gregory. I am the author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity and. I'm a sketchbook artist. And today I want to tell you a story about an artist who's met a huge one. Yeah. To me, not just because of his work, but because of how he lived. On my last trip to Europe, we spent a blazingly hot month in Amsterdam, and we finally got the rights, got to the Reichsmuseum and the van Gogh, museum van. Gogh's always been a huge inspiration to me. I love his colors, his ferocity. But most of all, the whole journey of discovery, the journey of discovery that he took trying to, to beat and bend himself into being an artist in just 10 years, he went from painting, awful Brown crap into changing art for all time. I've always felt kind of like a kindred spirit because of the way that van Gogh went about teaching himself, how he absorbed so many influences, how he went down one path after another to just get clearer and more direct in his work. It's something we can all learn from. He spent a few months in art school and he studied under a couple of professionals and he read lots of instructional books. But most of all, he just painted and painted and painted, filling a canvas a day, sometimes day after day. As you can imagine, I was really excited by this enormous show called van Gogh at work. And it focuses entirely on this process showing how. Vincent learned and evolved through more than 200 drawings and paintings and sketchbooks. And there are exhibits of his easels and his paints and his pallets and his preparatory drawings and loads of completed masterpiece all in this sweeping chronological exhibit that covers four entire floors of the museum. And. I learned just a huge amount in the hours that I spent there. First, there was the shock of seeing all these amazing paintings as working examples, rather than"masterpieces" giving them an immediacy that maybe understand. How van Gogh himself must have seen them. Have you ever had the experience of, of seeing an artist with his own work and how he might rub the paint with his thumb or want to repaint a corner or throwing the canvas onto a stack in the corner? Artists have such a different relationship with their pieces than curators gallerists, who tiptoe around with white gloves and x-ray machines because artists value the process of their art as much, if not more than the actual products of that process. Then go with paint on the back old paintings, or just scrape them down so that he could make something new. He would knock out stacks of paintings of the exact same subject trying new and different things. And when you see, for example, both paintings of his famous yellow bedroom at oral two versions of an iconic image hanging next to each other, similar. But different in a hundred ways. Well, you feel the living artists behind them, how he thought and developed what he was considering, where he saw mystiques that became lessons, how often he would make copies of his pain. So he could just give them to other people. It's just hang them up to brighten up his room, all those priceless sunflowers, or he made them to, so that Gauguin would be happy in a cheerfully decorated room when he came to ol. And he was such a thirsty sponge. So he's studying others, people and their work absorbing and mimicking and incorporating, and then surpassing us long list of iconic painters who at first seemed to him to be the betters, but ultimately look regressive formulaic, and only have their moment now past thanks to van Gogh. You get the sense that people are always telling him, no, this is how you must make art from one professional teacher in his hometown of briefly mentored him to the teachers at the Academy who gave him the worst marks to the impressionists who opened his eyes in Paris to Gaugin and on and on, everyone knows better. And he seems to listen guilelessly but unlike them. He's never satisfied. He never thinks he has the final answer and he keeps pushing on. I love this quote from him. I hope to do it better in time. I, myself am very far from satisfied with this, but well, getting better must come through doing it. And through trying that's painted on the wall of the show. You could sense how hard he was working and how he kept pushing himself onward. Even if you liked a painting that he'd done, he try something new, a new approach, a new subject, new materials, different canvas sizes, new, new, new, new, you never felt like the journey was over that he had arrived. There was so much more to discover. I love that hunger and enthusiasm. And as the chronology of the show takes him and you from milestone to milestone, you can see his work progress, and yet retain certain things that make them all Vango. He copies and copies and copies in precious Dutch masters, Japanese wood cuts all of his friends from Lautrec to Seurat, absorbing each influence, going down by a ways. And. Dead ends and cul-de-sacs accumulating new ideas and ways of seeing. And yet each brushstroke can't help, but look like his, he couldn't help being Van Gogh, his passion and his passion never beats. The miracle of what he's making himself into through, through sheer force of will is exciting and inspiring. No matter how familiar the images look, seeing them in the flesh makes them new and exciting. Oh, and he's always drawing their lines over and under the paint that gives everything definition and clarity. That's been my desire with my paintings too, but it didn't seem painterly, but he shows how it can be his influences in this are those Japanese wood cuts and look Trek and go gang lines that are sometimes black or in contrast in colors or just darker shades or hues of they're blocked in shapes or lines that graduate in color and tone along their length. Sometimes the lines are picture elements, a branch, a window frame, a doorway, the edge of a pedal, but often they're just there to separate planes and outline color fields. Also surprised to learn that he just used ordinary off the shelf store-bought pre-stretch canvases. And that for a long time, he relied on a wire perspective frame to help him draw more accurately cheating. I don't think so. And that he would also use lengths of colored wall to plan out color compositions of his paintings. They show the actual box full of balls, of yarn, the correspond to many of his famous works. It's amazing to see. And finally, I saw that his work is a record of his life. He painted the people that he knew, lovers, friends, neighbors, postman, landlords, the places he lived, the cafes he ate in the landscape all around him. His subjects had meaning to him and it shows in his best work when he does academic work. Painting from professional models or plaster casts. It just feels dull and lifeless. But when he paints sunflowers that he picked irises that he wants to decorate a room he's going to live in. The difference is palpable. I've always loved his paintings of almond blossoms against the teal background, a background that he painted last carefully outlining every branch. Now I know that he painted it so carefully for his newly born nephew blossoms for a fresh life and there's love and care in every stroke. Great art isn't scary and imposing and important. It's personal and full of feeling. At some point, van Gogh gave up making paintings to be sold. That seemed like it was never going to happen. Instead, he made so many paintings because he had to, he wanted to, he had problems to unravel and the world around him was beautiful and cried out to him to be embraced. The last two paintings in the show left me with a lump in my throat, like the ending of a great 1940s movie. The wheat field, a swirl with a crows, big wet on wet strokes that he slapped down in the baking sun. It's a painting that says well-known as a symbol symbol of his supposedly tortured state. But the very, very last painting was one that I'd never seen before. It's of the roots of trees tangled. Like snakes and it's unfinished. It was his last lesson and he never completed it. What must that last day have been like him stomping in the middle of a painting and deciding that he'd had enough, that it was hopeless and putting a revolver to his chest. One can never know. I walked down from the fourth floor of the museum after seeing all of his hard work over the years, all of his experiments and discoveries is catching up to, and then surpassing so many other great artists. It was so sad to think that in the end van Gogh felt he had failed. Imagine if Vincent had known how loved he would soon be. How we would all learn from his lessons and discoveries, how his works would become icons and decorate tea towels and boxer shorts. And that the voice in his head was utterly wrong. Despite how it seemed that one lousy day, the monkey is almost always wrong. And the only answer. Is to keep trying and pushing and learning and discovering the road has no end, just lots of twists and turns and it keeps moving upward. Even if we can't feel it all the time. Thanks for joining me today. I'll create something new for you again next week until then I'm Danny Gregory and this is hard for all.