Van Gogh's Wheatfields
In 1890, just a few days before taking his own life, Vincent van Gogh painted "Wheat Field With Cypresses", a wonderfully abstract landscape van Gogh apparently felt would be the appropriate exit from his haunted existence. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this piece can be found between "Women Picking Olives" and "Olive Orchard," both of which display van Gogh's love of nature. "Wheat Field With Cypresses" is a grand landscape painted very abstractly, much like a daytime version of "Starry Night." The beauty shown within the clouds, trees, and wheat, all simultaneously blowing in the wind draws the viewer in. In van Gogh's sky he uses a broad mixture of blues swirling among the heavenly clouds. His trees and grass use a varity of shades of green as well, while the wheat field itself contrasts this as a rich golden-brown. Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter, whose work represents the archetype of expressionism, as well as the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting. Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. His mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, who liked to sketch and paint wildflowers in her spare time as a hobby, was born into a family o
The painting method that he developed over the short span of his career was short, abrupt, brush strokes leaving thick lines of paint on the surface of the canvas. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. I later came to enjoy "Starry Night" so much that I couldn't help but compare the two. It was during this time period that Vincent was under Dr. For van Gogh all visible phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and spiritual vitality. It was his pain and sadness that unleashed his brilliance. In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. Without the possibility of tomorrow, van Gogh did not want to be a part of today. His work titled "Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat" revealed the thick lines of paint which were transformed into different shades of color as the brushstroke continued across the canvas. It is an image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it - but what I have sought is "the almost smiling. Canaday feels that van Gogh has "lost the spiritual intensity" that once made him great, and that "there is a sense of deflation in the Auvers pictures.
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