Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) absorbed some techniques from the Impressionist method and Seurat's pointillist method. He likes to use pure color dots and pure color brush strokes to paint techniques, using brush strokes to reduce colors to zero, and also integrates his passion into vibrant handwriting. People familiar with art history know that Van Gogh was a lonely artist who was not accepted by society, and even suffered from mental illness, but from his paintings, we can see that he is actually a painter who loves the world very much, but he has put all his passion for the world into his brushstrokes.
No artist before Van Gogh could have used this method of dealing with brushstrokes so consistently. Many artists before Van Gogh also used bold, rough brushwork in their work, but their work was to express the artist's superb skill, agile perception and present a scene. Van Gogh's paintings are meant to convey his uplifting mood, he likes to paint some content that can fully express the new means, and the motif he chooses can not only be colored with a paintbrush, but also can be painted with a line drawing, and even repeated thick painting. The cypress trees and crop fields in his paintings have unprecedented vitality, and the shape of the flames tumbling is only the warmth of Van Gogh himself.
Cornfields with Cypress Trees, Van Gogh, 1889
In addition to those things that are realistically accessible, Van Gogh set his sights on the sun, using a complicated ground landscape to reflect the dazzling light of the sun, although it is only a black and white sketch, but it can also show Van Gogh's warm feelings for the sun.
The Landscape of Saint-Marie de la Mer, 1888 Van Gogh
In addition to these motifs that express a warm mood, Van Gogh also has some works that express something simple, calm, and common that has not been noticed by artists before, at least not enough to be a motif for most artists. In 1889, Van Gogh painted the narrow living room in Arles, and the colors in the painting were all solemn colors that Van Gogh thought he could relax, or that there was only color in this painting, and even the relationship between light and shade and shadows were deliberately hidden, and they were created with the free flat pastels of Japanese prints.
Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, 1889 Van Gogh
Van Gogh did not care whether the expression was correct or not. He uses colors and shapes to express his feelings about what he paints and how he wants others to feel. He doesn't care much about the stereoscopic sense of the picture, nor does he care about the "camera-like precision" of nature. Similar to Cézanne, Van Gogh would not hesitate to exaggerate or even change the shape of things as long as they could achieve the desired goal, and both of them consciously abandoned the painting goal of "imitating nature". Although the methods they chose were surprisingly similar, their starting points were different. When Cézanne paints still lifes, he wants to explore the relationship between shape and perspective, and the "correct perspective method" is based on whether Cézanne's experiments are needed, and he wants to find a balance between Impressionism and classical painting, and Cézanne will still use perspective to a certain extent to shape space and depth of field when necessary. Van Gogh's paintings are not meant to express space, everything on the canvas exists to express his feelings, in order to express feelings, Van Gogh does not care about any existing laws, only techniques that can help him express emotions will appear in his paintings.
Van Gogh was an artist who lived in art, he devoted everything in his life to art, his exploration and attempt at painting provided more possibilities for later artists, and had a profound influence on later Fauvism and Expressionism, and was hailed as a pioneer of Expressionism. Like many artists, he lived in poverty, but it was many years before he was offered to the altar when his greatness was discovered, and although he was not an Impressionist who succumbed to visual sensations, his experience was also a microcosm of the struggle of the Impressionists.
On April 14, 2021