Indelible Impressions – Vincent
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Marshall Cavendish issued a series about the great artists when I was younger, which I religiously collected – and still have. Every issue was just as religiously studied and with some of the artists, Van Vogh amongst them, I struggled to understand just what was special about their work.
Wheat Field with Crows, 1890
“In both figure and landscape … I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly.”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
21 July 1882
This particular painting, Wheat Field with Crows was a ‘milestone’ for me. I studied the colour plate for all the aspects I could think of – in the end I just sat and looked at it, allowing my eye to wander around the surface. I expect I filled in with many suppositions and assumptions, adding my own cultural interpretation about the ‘murder of crows’ but as I looked, there was so much sadness in this painting that it brought tears to my eyes; I didn’t know paintings could do that. It was many years before I stood before another painting that moved me as powerfully again, after I’d mistakenly thought that that effect was unique to this particular painting.
Garden with Arbor, June, 1881
“What I like so much about painting is that with the same amount of trouble which one takes over a drawing, one brings home something that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasant to look at … it is more gratifying than drawing.
But it is absolutely necessary to be able to draw the right proportion and the position of the object pretty correctly before one begins. If one makes mistakes in this, the whole thing comes to nothing.”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
20 August 1882
It didn’t convert me into an admirer of Vincent’s work but I wasn’t going to dismiss him when he was the only artist I knew of that could create that effect on me. I’ve ‘bumped up’ against some of his oils since, usually reluctantly, and it’s always been rewarding for what I’ve learnt, if not a totally pleasant experience.
I’d seen a few of his drawings over the years and knew of course, of his reputation as a draughtsman and of all his letters to his brother Theo – but I’d never read any quotations or had any idea of the volume of drawings and sketches he produced – so the examples and quotations here were a delightful surprise to me. I thoroughly enjoyed the glimpses into how he thought about his work from the quotations.
So, in his own words…
Landscape with Willows and Sun Shining Through the Clouds, mid-March 1884
”Corot drew and modelled every tree trunk with the same devotion and love as if it were a figure.”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
c.September 1881
”If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it really is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it.”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
c.15 October 1881
Haystacks near a Farm, 12-13 June 1888
“… you will see when you come to the studio that besides the seeking for the outline I have, just like everyone else, a feeling for the power of color. And that I do not object to doing watercolors; but the foundation of them is the drawing, and then from the drawing many other branches beside the watercolor sprout forth, which will develop in me in time as in everybody who loves his work. …”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
31 July 1882
Olive Trees, Montmajour 1888
”I have been knocking about in the orchards, and the result is five size 30 canvases, which along with the three studies of olives that you have, at least constitute an attack on the problem.
The olive is as variable as our willow or pollard willow in the North, you know the willows are very striking, in spite of their seeming monotonous, they are the trees characteristic of the country.
Now the olive and the cypress have exactly the significance here as the willow has at home.
What I have done is a rather hard and coarse reality beside their abstractions, but it will have a rustic quality, and will smell of the earth. ”
Letter to Theo van Gogh
c.21 November 1889
