The Vincent Van Gogh exhibit at the Denver Art Museum is it’s curator’s dream to show Van Gogh’s development from novice to mature artist and affirm his profound influence on generations of artists and art history itself. It took many years and much effort for him to bring together Van Gogh’s unique works from where they have scattered all over the world.
At the very beginning of my tour of the exhibit, I was struck by the similarity of Van Gogh’s early color sense to Rembrandt’s, who preceded him by 150 years. It made sense to me, given they were both Dutch, though they were born a century and a half apart. And throughout the tour, I was reminded that Van Gogh was self-taught artist who took his cues from the artists of his time and many art traditions. In subject matter, however, he early on differentiated himself by depicting the lowly and downtrodden in life – farmers on the land, village scenes, poor people eating potatoes. Not many artists did that before Van Gogh.
He worked very methodically, with simple media, such as grey and black pencil or pastel, neutral-toned paper, and flat watercolor guache – until he mastered it. He learned to draw by copying drawings from a “teach yourself to draw” book. And he worked step-by-step to render images with short lines and flat surfaces while at the same time building his sense of contour and composition.
One of Van Gogh’s early tools was a “perspective frame” which helped him compose outdoor scenes (he usually drew and painted outdoors). This is an elevated wooden frame with adjustable legs for uneven terrain. Wire lines are strung diagonally from corner to corner and from side to side of the rectangular frame and all wires converge on a single point in the middle, to create perspective.
This is how Van Gogh translated a 360 degree image of outdoor space into a 2-dimensional rectangular drawing or painting with an illusion of three-dimensional space and distance. Van Gogh would even draw the lines of the perspective frame onto paper or canvas, in order to position each object in the landscape in relation to the horizon line and other objects.
Once Van Gogh felt confident with black, white, and grey drawings and paintings, he began to paint in color. His favorite subject matter quickly became beautiful flowers. He was living in the city of Paris, which was replete with flower vendors. Although he was a typical “starving artist”, there was enough money for him to buy and paint flowers of all colors, shapes, and textures. In this way, he began to develop his color and texture sense. And since he didn’t have money for art models, he would often paint himself from his reflection in a mirror.
Around that time, Van Gogh enrolled in an art school with other students, where he met and became friends with the future famous artist — Toulouse Lautrec. They began to influence each other’s art. But, then the traditional approach to art education was to draw and paint statues (live models were considered too expensive) and since Van Gogh loved painting life, he left to pursue his own artistic vision.
Paris had become a hot house for innovative artists when Van Gogh met Georges Seurat. He was inventing the new artistic style of “pointillism” — painting with little dots of paint to make a coherent image. Seurat became a big influence on Van Gogh, who started multiplying the short strokes of bright colors in his paintings.
Then, Van Gogh decided to move to Southern France, where the light was said to be particularly well-suited to painting. There he completed most of his famous works, most likely in a frenzy of activity, possibly all day, every day.
In these later paintings, he seems enraptured by the intense colors and odd shapes of the land, soothed by the flat planes of people he portrayed, put off balance by the quirky perspectives of his room — the awkward bed with it’s red coverlet, the leaning chair and side table.
Dazzling multitudes of short strokes and brilliantly-colored planes create a sense of tension between living movement and solidity in his last paintings. These are not naturalistic representations, but show the tension and force of nature. The clouds are not static shapes, but surge powerfully across the land. Stars in the night sky whirl like light wheels in the heavens. The mountains tower boldly above the fields in a dynamism of mature style.
It took Van Gogh a short 10 years of super-human effort to complete this artistic journey, to become a master of light, paint, and meaning, to become fluent with color, shape, and composition, and to focus his artistic vision so that it can shine into the world, and so that we, too, can marvel at what he saw.