Vincent Van Gogh

Sunflowers
This painting of sunflowers by Van Gogh is called Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers and was painted in Arles, France in August 1888. The material used to make this painting is oil paints. Most of Vincents work is in the style of Postimpressionist. You can see this painting in the National Gallery in London. My first feelings about this piece of work is that I feel quite cheerful when I look at the colours used as I think yellow is a bright, happy colour, but then I feel the browns diminishing the feeling. I really like the way he used short, flicking strokes which turn into long, curving lines to give the appearance that he does not think it is a completely perfect picture, and it is almost as if you are watching him paint, and every time he swirls the brush around to create a new side of looking at the picture then you jump and your spirits lift with the brush. I think that this painting shows the time when he has just discovered the real meaning of art and has reached the peak of his career. Unlike other paintings at the time, his lines were curved and flowing, rather that the straight rigid lines of other artists. I think his emotions were expressed very clearly in the painting and they seem to relate to the colours of the sunflower: the bright, vibrant and cheerful yellow to the drooping, wilted and death colour of brown. Van Goghs paintings of sunflowers were actually very similar to one another and there are few differences between one piece and the next. However, each of them was unique in their own way. Van Gogh never stated whether he liked sunflowers particularly or not but he

made several mentions to them in his letters. In two letters to his brother, Theo, and sister he talks of his friend Paul Gauguin coming to stay and his hopes to impress him with lots of paintings of sunflowers. Gauguin apparently did like the sunflowers but it is not clear whether Vincent painted them to make up for the fight they had (in which Vincent cut off the others ear) or simply because he loved the colours. Van Gogh had quite a thing for sunflowers, and on his deathbed he quoted It is a kind of painting that rather changes in character, and takes on a richness the longer you look at it You know the peony is Jeannins, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is somewhat my own. Other artists began to paint in the same style as Van Gogh after knowing him during his life and these include Lucien Pissarro, John Peter Russell, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. All these artists had very similar style in which they painted and drew: for example, they all laid the paint on very thickly when painting and when they drew they all started to use lines that caressed the paper and understood it unlike they had done before. Here are a few of their works.