The piece of art I choose to deconstruct was a self portrait of Vincent van Gogh he drew in 1889. I saw the painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The way the self portrait was done is that it is an oil painting on canvas. The background is a dark blue, with him wearing a lighter blue colored smock, white undershirt, yellow-orange hair, and a pale gaunt face. The color used also adds emphasis to the painting. This is due to the main colors being contrasting colors the yellow-orange being a warm color and blue being a cooler color. Unlike some of the other self portraits Vincent van Gogh did that were in lighter and brighter colors that showed that he was in a better place in life and mentally the depressing colors used show that mentally and in life he was depressed …show more content…
The brushstrokes are also harder and rushed looking adding to the harshness of the paining and the message it gives. The shapes used in this painting have sharper colors used for his face which gives him the effect of looking sick, the smock uses smoother lines that give a flowing look that makes him seem underweight, and the palette is a square. Vincent van Gogh drew mainly subjects such as landscape, still life, portraiture, but what he is most remembered for are his self-portraits. Vincent van Gogh painted this while he was at the asylum at St.-Rémy. He had admitted himself after he had another mental breakdown. This was the first thing he painted after he felt good enough to do it and it was done all in one setting. He believed that the only way he would get better is if he did more work. When I look at the painting what I see is the depression of a tortured soul. It is evident though that he hasn’t given up though. His life was hard and he hadn’t been given the credit he was due yet he never stopped painting. Even after breaking down mentally and spending a month in bed he continued to paint. And the first thing he did was a haunting self portrait to show the depression he
It seems to be his style of painting, thick brush strokes. It is not simple, there is much to the painting, there is emotion in the painting. It is a stunning piece made by him.
Even the faces of the men in the foreground appear to be wax like and flat. One of the least successful faces in the piece is that of the practitioner who is in the lower right corner of the piece, closest to the bottom edge. His face only contains three distinct values of skin tone, which makes his face appear one dimensional and lifeless. Furthermore, his left hand seems to be awkwardly placed and disproportionate in its length in comparison to the dimensions of his face. While his left hand flows somewhat with his body and reflects the style of the rest of the piece, his right hand, which is much lighter in color as if it somehow managed to catch all the light from an unknown light source, shows no consistency with the artist’s technique. It is bulky and out of place. The way it grasps the surgical instrument seems very unnatural. In fact, the only purpose the hand serves in this piece is to connect this man to the scene itself as an extension of this triangular composition. In this sense this figure is important, for his disproportionate body catches the viewers eye at the very edge of the painting, just as his or her attention is about to waive, and shoots it back into the main composition.
Jackson Pollock was an American abstract artist born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. He was the youngest of his five brothers. Even though he was born on a farm, he never milked a cow and he was terrified of horses because he grew up in California. He dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and proceeded to move to New York City with his older brother, Charles, and studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Thomas Benton was already a great artist at the time in which Pollock studied with him. Benton acted like the father figure in Pollock’s life to replace the original that wasn’t there. Benton was known for his large murals that appear on ceilings or walls. “Jack was a rebellious sort at all times,” recalls his classmate and friend, artist Harold Lehman. He grew his hair long and helped pen a manifesto denouncing athletics, even though “he had a muscular build and the school wanted to put him on the football team,” says former teacher Doug Lemon. Pollock always was upset with himself in his studies because he had troubles drawing things like they were supposed to look. From 1938 to 1942, Jackson joined a Mexican workshop of people with a painter named David Siqueiros. This workshop painted the murals for the WPA Federal Art Projects. This new group of people started experimenting with new types of paint and new ways of applying it to large canvas. People say that this time period was when Jackson was stimulated with ideas from looking at the Mexican or WPA murals. Looking at paintings from Picasso and the surrealists also inspired Jackson at this time. The type of paint they used was mixing oil colors with paint used for painting cars. Jackson noticed that the shapes and colors they created were just as beautiful as anything else was. Jackson realized that you didn’t have to be able to draw perfect to make beautiful paintings. Jackson started developing a whole new way of painting that he had never tried before and his paintings were starting to look totally different from before.
Jackson Pollock’s artwork is about expressing his feelings rather than illustrating it. Throughout the movie Pollock struggles with alcoholism. That being said, his artwork from the movie changes. Such as, the mural in this artwork he uses a lot of lines, dark colors, and shapes like circles. But as Lee and Jackson moved out of the city he does not use line, texture, and value. But rather uses more colors. In my opinion painting number 5 is what Pollock’s was feeling. He felt really angry about things because he can’t really stay away with alcohol.
Then as his age progressed and he studied with Thomas Benton, he began to paint more expressive pieces. Fast forward to his time with the Jungian analyst who was helping him to treat his alcoholism they encouraged him to create drawings again which would later be the guide to create his paintings. These works during this time shaped Pollock’s understanding of his painting not only as projections of his insides but expressions of his fear and pain and those of modern society at the time living with the loom of nuclear war overhead. Pollock’s work depended on what was going on in the world around him and he used his talents to expose or to deal with the way he was feeling sober or not. Pollock was expressive in his work especially in his drip paintings. Pollock was so personal in his work that he created a new look and style of painting with his painting later in his body of art. Pollock relied on his intuition and his body to infuse his images with emotional force, he felt driven to express his emotions through painting (Metro
Painted by Vincent Van Gogh during a final burst of activity in Auvers before his suicide in July, Houses at Auvers features many of the characteristic elements typical of Van Gogh; the experimentation with color, texture, and thick brush strokes. This painting depicts the view and landscape in early summer, highlighting the patchwork of houses and the rolling greenery. Van Gogh’s unique, thick brush strokes lead the eyes through the painting, create texture and patterns and also highlight and shadow objects in the early summer sun, while his experimentation with color creates contrast and a bright, vibrant image.
The composition of the painting takes place with the square of the canvas. The square is approximately 5' x 5'. A black frame surrounding the painting protrudes approximately 4" off the canvas. There is a 1" inlay between the canvas and frame. From this square, Reinhardt breaks the composition into six equal squares in three even rows. Texture is no where to be found in the painting. No visual indication of the artist's brush stroke is present. No varnished glare is given off by the piece. The entire work, including the frame, is completely matte. The squares take up the entire canvas in a checkerboard type arrangement. Each square is a slightly different shade of blue-black. It almost becomes impossible to see the difference between each square. The middle squares in the top and bottom rows shift more towards blue than the rest of the squares. The division of these middle squares become more obvious than the others. When the painting is looked at from a distance, it is almost impossible to see any of the squares at all. When looking from a far, all a viewer can see is a blackish blue canvas. As you stare longer into the painting, a halo begins to form around the corners of the canvas, creating a circle inside the square. Once you look away from the canvas, the circle is gone. With this observation in mind, we could say that the painting most definitely relies on the viewer. A viewer is required to look at the piece for its full affect. We could say that the squares in the painting are self-contained.
This painting by Vincent Van Gogh is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, in the Impressionism exhibit. There are many things going on in this painting that catch the viewer’s eye. The first is the piece’s vibrant colors, light blues and browns, bright greens, and more. The brush strokes that are very visible and can easily be identified as very thick some might even say bold. The furniture, the objects, and the setting are easy to identify and are proportioned to each other. There is so much to see in this piece to attempt to explain in only a few simple sentences.
“[He] was the finest painter of them all: Certainly the most popular great painter of all time, the most beloved, his command of color the most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world—No one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. …That strange, wild man who roamed the fields
Claude Monet made the art community address a revolutionary type of art called impressionism. In a style not previously before painted, impressionism captured a scene by using bright colors with lots of light and different shades to create the illusion of a glance. The traditional method of working in a studio was discarded and the impressionist artists carried any needed supplies with them into the countryside and painted the complete work outside. The manufacture of portable tin tubes of oil paints as well as the discovery of ways to produce a wider range of chemical pigments allowed artists to paint in a way unimaginable before this period in time (Stuckey 12). Monet and others, such as Pierre Auguste Renior, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, took this style of art to a new level never seen before.
Jackson Pollack and Vincent van Gogh are some of most famous artist before and after their time. Each artist has a similar and different painting methods that they use when painting pictures. There most well-known paintings are called “Number 1” and “The Starry Night”. The paintings give off emotion by how they look, but each one is painted in different ways. The public did not find their paintings wanting when they were made. The difference was how long it took for them to get recognized for their work. Lastly, the paintings gave different and similar reactions to people that have changed over the years of their existence.
In conclusion, Van Gogh used the elements above to create a man by himself in a field. He used color to represent feeling rather than represent realism of an event. The cool colors represent the field and happiness in his work. The warm colors represent the harshness of the day and could be a metaphor for life. He used scale and proportion to emphasis the overbearing sun. He also used proportion and scale to represent literally and figuratively how far away home was. The linear perspective was only evident to me after I really studied the used of lines. I followed the lines to the horizon and left side of the painting.
Vincent Van Gogh is often remembered for his enigmatic personality. In the novel, he is portrayed as timid and unsure of himself. Although Stone takes a lot of creative license with the novel, the book version of Van Gogh sounds very similar to the real one. In the novel he says, "You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important" (Stone, Irving). This quotation accurately summarizes up much of Van Gogh's character. He is hesitant about the choices he makes in life, yet he does not regret them. This is an integral characteristic that the writer chose to emphasize. Much of Van Gogh's art is based off of that concept of
I was lucky enough to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in November of last year. The museum was located in somewhat of a museum park. The Rijks museum and the Stedelijk Museum are located on the same block. A beautiful landscape of ponds and trees are centered around them. The Van Gogh Museum has an audio tour available in all languages via a handheld tour guide. Unfortunately, funds limited me to get the audio tour, but I was able to nonchalantly follow a British couple around most of the five floors. The museum chronologically directes you through a collection of Van Gogh's and his contemporery's works.
When most people think of Paul Cezanne, they think of two words genius and painting. For these two words he is consider by far to be the Father of modern painting. Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. He was to die in the same town in 1906.