About VG
I think it's rather wonderful that artists can travel back over 150 years to draw upon comments by the various impressionists (they never called themselves that),and show their relevance to creativity in our modern times.
If you ever have the opportunity to read 'Van Gogh The Life' by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, you will discover, within this meticulous and lengthy research, that we harbour so many myths about the artist that are completely untrue. It is fatuous to name them all and anyway you will discover them for yourself.
But there are a couple of things which interest me concerning his working methods which are relevant today, especially to artists who are also teachers of creativity; how to start and continue a painting, sculpture, poem, the construction of music or choreography in dance or theatre etc.
I remember going to Paris some years back to see a little exhibition of Vincents's letters to his brother Theo. They were translated into English and most of them made me laugh and cry in their sadness .
In one funny one, he moaned to Theo that he was forever being asked by folks how he started a painting.'But don't they know? Isn't it obvious? I just splash a colour over the canvas, let the paint dry for a couple of days, come back to canvas and take the image where it wants to go'.
This had a powerful effect to me and, incidentally, it is a method I use in my workshops to sidestep the fear of the empty white canvas. It is play, and draws upon the child in us.
Another surprise was that his famous landscapes were an amalgam of bits and pieces of various drawings he made during his wanderings; a hill, here, a town there, a sky however. So like Cezanne and Gaugin, he was an abstract painter. The images,orchestrated through him, are telling us a story that they want to convey.
So, by way of a (near) example, I am showing you above a painting I made a few days ago; incidentally during the days around the USA election, the continuing wars in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine. It was not a story I'd conceived nor does it have any message I'd wanted to convey. It just arrived and I got (from somewhere) the instruction STOP, don't go any further (this is an important word for artists by the way (including Chefs)).
As is my practice, I sent it out to artist friends and other folks who's opinion I respect, and they each have seen something in the image.
As the American artist and teacher Robert Henri wrote over a hundred years ago
'A great painter will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, 'How did I do it?' The real artist's work is a surprise to himself '
That sort of sums it up.......sort of...
Michael
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