Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Vincent Van Gogh's Notebooks

I'm updating websites at the moment while playing an old BBC programme about Vincent van Gogh's Notebooks on my Mini iPad which sits just in front of my iMac.

Do play it - it's excellent!

It's the equivalent of listening to a good Radio 4 programme while including black and white photography of his drawings and paintings. I find I don't miss the colour as I know most of the images used so well.
This documentary, made for the BBC's schools and colleges strand, follows Van Gogh's story from his early studies until his death. The programme details the hardship that the artist witnessed and endured throughout his life. (1964)
I hadn't realised the influence of his Japanese woodcuts on changing his style from the strong, sombre, stylised drawings to a more refined and lighter drawings and then paintings which included colour.  Or the impact that trying to draw light had on his own scope for mark-making.
He tried to draw light and even colour and created a new set of notation marks
Van Gogh Starry Night Drawing
Starry Night (Saint-Rémy, June 1889)
Medium drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper; 47 × 62.5 cm (18.5 × 24.6 in)
(Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow)
The programme is a great mix of intelligent selection of quotations, film of places he visited and painted and a narrative which covers both biographical history and the changes in his artistic practice.

Vincent Van Gogh 0018
View of Arles, flowering orchards (April 1889)
(Flowering Orchards - a Van Gogh series)
oil on canvas, 72 × 92 cm (28.3 × 36.2 in)

I made a study of Van Gogh and particularly of his drawings back in February 2007 - and, as a result have written about him on and off ever since!

Below is a list of my blog posts about Vincent Van Gogh - and the website I created at the same time.
and my website

2 comments:

  1. Is there a way to watch this if you are outside the UK?
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well I know people do but I'm not very sure how they do it.

    ReplyDelete

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