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Category: Vincent Van Gogh

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Why are art babies so ugly?

The Haller Madonna, Albrecht DĂŒrer, 1498
We interrupt this regularly-scheduled programming to address the age-old question of why babies in paintings are often deformed, distorted, and generally ugly. (And, BTW, this phenom isn’t limited to Renaissance babies, no matter what the current meme says.) It isn’t because the artists can’t draw; I’ve included examples by superb draftsmen.
There are a lot of theories about this, covering context to symbolism to the possibility that earlier babies just were not that good looking in the first place.
The Baby Marcelle Roulin, Vincent van Gogh, 1888
Having had several babies myself, and having done a lot of figure painting, I think the answer is much simpler: babies make lousy models. They squirm and howl when they’re uncomfortable, and they won’t hold a pose. They have no muscle tone and very little neck, and they wobble. Pre-photography, the best the artist could do was limb in a few lines and return the pathetic little creature to its mother’s arms.
The Three Ages of Man, Titian, 1511
On the other hand, I’ve always wondered why so many Renaissance infants are pictured wearing jewelry. Didn’t they get the memo about choking hazards?
Newborn Baby in a Crib, Lavinia Fontana, c. 1583
Enough of this. I have a new little grandson to go visit. He arrived squalling into the world last night, and I haven’t yet begun to paint his portrait.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.
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A personal aside

Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead), etching, 1910, by KĂ€the Kollwitz,  

Forty-five years ago, I was at a school pool in Niagara County, New York, when my sister had a brain bleed. She died. With us were my friend S. and her mom, although at the time they seemed tangential to the tragedy that engulfed my family.

It was compounded four years later when my brother—who happened to be S.’s classmate—was killed by a drunk driver.
Sorrowful old man, pencil, black lithographic crayon, wash, white opaque watercolor, on watercolor paper, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1882
We move on. Our flock tends to be made of birds of the same coloration. And I think I’m probably an unmotivated intellectual. Why, just yesterday, I was discussing Steiner and Kandinsky and their daft color theories with three dear friends. This is fun, it’s fluff, and no more or less meaningful than talking football is for other people.
I haven’t seen S. in years, but through the miracle of Facebook, we’re in loose contact.
Last evening, my mom died. I refuse to discuss my grief with anyone, but it is substantial.
And then S. posted this video:
For the first time I understand what it meant to praise God from the depths of grief. That’s wisdom, and it’s a far greater thing than knowledge.

Message me if you want information about next year’s workshops.
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The Open Road (continued)

Landscape with a Carriage and a Train, Vincent van Gogh, 1890
Yesterday, I wrote about contemporary paintings of the open road. These would be impossible without photography or the automobile, so they are very much of our time.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people moved around on foot, by horse, or by ship. While there were genre painters dealing with those subjects, the mechanics of life did not particularly interest artists or their patrons. The social realism (or naturalism) movement of the 19thcentury changed that. Its concern with the lives of the working class included the ways in which people travelled.
Vincent van Gogh painted Landscape with a Carriage and a Train shortly before his death, after he had left the asylum at Saint-RĂ©my. “Lately I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life,” he wrote.
The Third-Class Carriage, Honoré Daumier, 1864
The Third-Class Carriage by HonorĂ© Daumier is the most well-known, and perhaps the earliest, depiction of mass transit, which has become such a fact of life in our modern existence.
Third-class railway carriages were dirty, crowded, and uncomfortable. They were filled with the lower orders. In short, they were the coach seats of their day. While the little family in the front row of Daumier’s painting are fully delineated, the figures in the back rapidly dissolve into the anonymity of the endless human crowd.
Steaming Streets by George Bellows (1908) is a harshly honest look at urban transport. No Currier and Ives romanticism here.
In our nostalgic imaginings we like to believe we would have achieved a first-class railway ticket, but the vast majority of us would have been traveling coach then, just as we do now.

Message me if you want information about next year’s workshops.
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Who sez art doesn’t pay?

The Concert by Johannes Vermeer was one of 13 pieces, worth $300 million, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. This was the largest art heist in history and remains one of the great mysteries of the art world.
I came across this factoid in a dumb novel recently: art crime is the third most lucrative criminal trade, after drugs and weapons. The FBI estimates the trade in stolen art and antiquities to be $6-8 billion annually.
This ought to come as no surprise when Christie’s and Sotheby’s together turn over about $11-12 billion a year.
These statistics don’t begin to address the dollar value of the estimated 650,000 pieces looted by the Nazis in Europe. The value of that work is, simply, incalculable.
Poppy Flowers by Vincent van Gogh was stolen from the Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo, Egypt in 2010. The same painting had been stolen from the same museum in 1977, but was recovered ten years later in Kuwait.
My studio assistant, Sandy Quang, is finishing her MA in Art History. Like all liberal arts majors, she’s worried about getting a job, since she’s internalized the message that art careers don’t pay. But that’s nonsense, as a recent kerfufflewith President Obama pointed out: arts graduates are both working and satisfied with their jobs. After all, sellers need art historians to authenticate and research their product. Furthermore, ours is an intensively-designed world. From our cars to the pens in our hands, everything we touch must be both beautiful and symbolic of our values. That’s all the work of artists.
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt van Rijn is another painting stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990. These paintings have never been recovered.
It’s no surprise that, when there aren’t enough precious works of art around, people will either forge or steal the stuff they want. But that should tell us something about art—it’s neither meaningless nor valueless. The vibrant criminal art economy tells us that art matters.

Sorry, folks. My workshop in Belfast, ME is sold out. Message me if you want a spot on my waitlist, or information about next year’s programs. Information is available here.

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Did you miss your calling?

Dr. Seuss was a successful commercial artist when, at age 34, he wrote his first book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” It was rejected by publishers dozens of times. He was in his late 40s when he began successfully writing and selling children’s books. He did this advertisement in the 1930s.
This past week I had conversations with two artists about the feasibility of being a full-time artist.
One is a woman with a young family, a mortgage, an MFA and a good (albeit temporary) job. Judging by the work I’ve seen, she has prodigious talent. If given the opportunity for a permanent position, should she take it? Or should she chuck that idea and try to work as a waitress nights and weekends so that she can still make art.
As a working mother, she is already doing two jobs. Adding a third job will be difficult, if not impossible. Until her kids are old enough for school, she’d be smart to do whatever pays best, and save money against the day she drops the day job and takes up painting again. In the meantime, she can carve out a small corner of her house and a few hours a week to nurture her talent, even if it’s by sketching in her spare time.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, was the poster girl for late-life career changes, having turned to painting in her seventies. Here, Country Fair, 1950.
In essence, that’s what I did. I worked in the marketplace until I was in my late 30s, when a combination of life events made it possible—mandatory, even—for me to resume painting. (There was a time when our society acknowledged that raising children was valuable work. Now, childrearing is supposed to run silently in the background, taking no time or effort at all.)
One of my painting students has an MBA and work experience in an area of business analysis I won’t pretend to understand. She picked up brushes in response to a life crisis and in the process discovered that she has a real affinity for it.
On Saturday, we discussed what the next step might be for a person who wants to start selling paintings. As so often happens with these things, Life answered her question; she was approached about doing a solo show at a local venue.
Vincent Van Gogh didn’t actually start painting until he was in his late 20s, when he only had a decade left to live. Most of his masterpieces were created in the last two years of his life. Wheat Field with Crows, 1890, is generally accepted to be his last painting.
That’s a tremendous affirmation, but as we old-timers know, a show is just a doorway through which you enter the next phase of your work. She still has a long, hard slog ahead of her, but she has the character to endure it.
Neither of these women will find it an easy road. But in both cases, I think they will find something very valuable comes from it.

Come to Maine and learn to paint before it’s too late. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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It’s apple blossom time

Orchard in Blossom, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh
This week, the fruit trees are starting to come into blossom. With my usual impeccable timing, I’m knee-deep in a project in my studio. Nevertheless, if Mother Nature cooperates, my class will be outdoors painting at G and S Orchards in Walworth this weekend.
Because I want my students to see how Vincent Van Gogh painted orchards in blossom, I went to Wikipaintingslooking for examples. I do this all the time, but this morning the process stopped me cold.
I’d estimate Wikipaintings has about 1900 paintings and drawings attributed to Van Gogh. Between November of 1881 and July of 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted almost 900 paintings. Wikipaintings, therefore, must have his complete oeuvre in one place.
Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh
We can’t understand a painting in depth from the internet. However, it’s quite possible to understand a painter in breadth using a resource like Wikipaintings. And, very simply, nothing like this existed any time in the past. When I was young, we looked at paintings on slides or in books. (In comparison, internet images are very clear.) The rare and pricey catalogue raisonnĂ©, compiled by researchers, was as close as we could get to a broad view of a painter’s work.
Orchard and House with Orange Roof,  1888, Vincent Van Gogh. Wanna paint as well as Van Gogh? Draw, draw, draw

We are beginning to see the development of online catalogue raisonnĂ© (see here for an example) but they’re almost redundant in the face of this free, open resource, Wikipaintings.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Happy Spring!

Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, 1888, Vincent van Gogh.
Today marks the vernal equinox, generally considered the first day of Spring. In the eastern United States, it’s been a dismal winter (which still hasn’t released us from its clutches). We long for Spring.
Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass, 1888, Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh painted a series of flowering almond trees in Arles and Saint-RĂ©my in 1888 and 1890. When he arrived in Arles in March 1888, the orchards were about to bloom. The blossoms ensnared him. In a month he produced fourteen paintings of blossoming peach, plum and apricot trees. “I am up to my ears in work for the trees are in blossom and I want to paint a Provençal orchard of astonishing gaiety,” he wrote.
Van Gogh’s Almond Tree in Bloom, 1888, resonates with me because it is a baby tree. So often we only see the picturesque in old trees.
The most well-known of his blossom paintings, of flowering branches against a blue field, has been reproduced on everything from ipod hardcases to duvet covers to switch plate covers.
It’s a pity this painting has been so misused, because he painted it in commemoration of the birth of his namesake nephew. “How glad I was when the news came… I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky,” he wrote.
Van Gogh was already studying flowering trees before he went to Arles. His Japonaiserie Flowering Plum Tree (1887, after Hiroshige) is a study in the Japanese woodcut style he admired so much.
I love orchards at any time of the year, but particularly in spring. This year I am feeling the same stirring to be out in an orchard when the apple trees blossom.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Even great painters have bad days

The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot
This morning I came across Tissot’s The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, above. Tissot was a fine painter, but one has to wonder what he was thinking to portray Rahab as a man in drag, with a 5 o’clock shadow. (For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Rahab was the original ‘hooker with a heart of gold.’ Joshua sent two spies into Jericho, and Rahab hid them on her roof, in exchange for which her family was spared during the sack of the city.)
Seascape, Calm Weather, 1864-65, Édouard Manet
I’m pretty uncomfortable on the days I share my ‘fails’ with you, but it helps to remember that even great artists have bad days. Consider Édouard Manet, who surely must rank as one of the most incisive painters who ever lived. He was capable of wonderfully complex compositions articulating wonderfully complex commentaries. Yet his seascapes range from mediocre to terrible; still, he painted a lot of them.
Sunset at Montmajour, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh’s Sunset at Montmajour was misattributed for a long time, although it was once owned by Theo Van Gogh. Art historians simply didn’t believe he could have painted something that pretty, that bland. It has taken modern paint analysis to prove that the pigments came from the master’s palette.
I think I’ve mentioned before: there is no secret gnosis to painting. There is only hard work.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Vincent Van Gogh

Autumn Landscape, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1885
I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is in the air. I’m leaving some wonderful fall landscapes for you.
This painting is one of Van Gogh’s earlier landscapes.  He hadn’t stepped into his mature style, and was still painting more or less as a traditional impressionist. Nevertheless, it works, largely because of the magnificent drawing.
He wrote to his brother Theo about this painting: “You know those three pollard oaks at the bottom of the garden at home; I have plodded on them for the fourth time. I had been at them for three days with a canvas the size of, lets say, the cottage, and the country church-yard which you have.

“The difficulty was the tufts of havana leaves, to model them and give them form, color, tone. Then in the evening I took it to that acquaintance of mine in Eindhoven, who has a rather stylish drawing room, where we put it on the wall (gray paper, furniture black with gold). Well, never before was I so convinced that I shall make things that do well, that I shall succeed in calculating my colors, so that I have it in my power to make the right effect.”

Falling Autumn Leaves, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!