For some time Vincent Van Gogh was at the mental hospital in St. Remy, Southern France where he painted some of his most iconic work including Starry Night. Many of the paintings he made were in the fields behind the hospital which were surrounded by a stone wall and backed by a wonderful landscape dotted with cottages and rolling mountains. The golden hayfields would be the subject of many of his final paintings. He would also discover the cypress pine tree motif in this area, one of which appears on the left front of Starry Night. After visiting the museum in Amsterdam and reading the book on Van Gogh by Taschen I was inspired to try and fuse his style with some other ideas I was working on at the time. I pulled an old painting out of my portfolio called "Apple Eye, Violet Sky" it was part of the doodleism lab book paintings, and decided to redo the painting in several different ways. This was another feature of Van Gogh's work, he would paint series of motifs making consecutive improvements and copies of the original. He did this because he was self taught and was learning from his trial and error, but also to fill the winter months and rainy days when it was impossible to paint outdoors as he liked to do. So I went to the grocer and bought five distinctive apples, then quickly made a practice version similar to what you see here. I resisted the urge to eat the apples, and made the finished work a few days later. The painting is larger than I usually do because I wanted it to fit in the frame that I use now to show a painting at home. The idea of specifically making a painting for decoration was another inspiration of Van Gogh, when his friend Gauguin came to visit, Vincent wanted some decorative paintings to make the apartment look inviting to entice his friend to stay. The result of that initiative was the infamous sunflower paintings.
My painting is a still life of five apples trying to escape a hay field in St. Remy. In fact, something that would make a pretty cool title, so I will put that in parenthesis. The apples are pushed up very high in the composition , and against the stone wall, making it look like they are blasting off or flying away. The biggest apple perspective wise (fourth from left) practically has a comet tail of fire coming off it (the hay). In the distant upper right there is a cottage and a very tiny figure of a painter with an easel representing Vincent. The top left has a city skyline which is a homage to the original painting I was working from (Apple Eye, Violet Sky). The cypress trees along the left edge are more tributes to Van Gogh and meant to fill the empty space there. Unfortunately it was hard to get a proper photo in the poor light, the original is more pastel-toned, while the photo you see is over saturated and unevenly lit. I will try to get a better photo if the sun comes out. This was the first painting I made with my new Series 7 Windsor Newton no 6. and no. 8 brushes that my parents picked up for me from Curry's in Ontario. They are pure sable and really handle the paint very well.
24 x 36" hot press (thin stock) December 2018
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