1882-1890 · 37 Gogh.art nodes
Colour
Colour is not Van Gogh’s surface style, but an experimental system: complements, night light, southern air and psychological intensity become a physical language.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Ferocious Reader
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Copyist
- The Translator
The Hague and Sien
He said he went to help her; he could not. This is not a tragedy that has been covered over, but something he never quite worked out himself.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Ferocious Reader
The Weavers
He painted the same proportion over and over, and in the end took no side.
- The Ferocious Reader
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Potato Eaters
The picture brought him no success, but he finally knew what he was painting for.
- The Ferocious Reader
- The Colour Experimenter
Still Life with Bible
He did not explain what it meant to set those two books side by side. Sometimes a painting is a position, and needs no footnote.
- The Ferocious Reader
- The Colour Experimenter
Antwerp Academy
He lived hard up in Antwerp, yet he still put his money and attention into materials, prints, and things worth looking at.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
The Paris Flower Studies
In Paris he used flowers to learn colour — and what actually happened in Theo's apartment over those two years, few have ever spoken of.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Pere Tanguy
Those who helped the painters usually vanish, afterward, into the backgrounds of the pictures.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
Still Life with Quinces and Lemons
For him colour was not a feeling but a working hypothesis. He needed a place to test it.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
View from Theo's Apartment
For two years they lived together — and of the inner detail of that time, almost no one has since spoken at length.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
Asnières landscape series
Here he learned to let light scatter — and then he set out to find a stronger light.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
The Self-Portraits
He was not searching for who he was; he was using his own face to do something technical.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Japanese Print Translations
He went to Arles because he believed it was the place he had seen in the prints.
- The Translator
- The Copyist
Orchards in Bloom
At the best of his time in Arles he felt it himself — but he did not know what to call it.
- The Translator
- The Colour Experimenter
The Sower Motif
He painted the sower many times in his life, but each time was not repetition — it was using one figure to test who he was at that moment.
- The Copyist
- The Colour Experimenter
The Sunflower Decoration
He painted the welcome ahead of time, and then waited for it to be seen.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
The Roulin Family
He was not painting himself an imagined family — he was painting, for the few who really stayed, a portrait that might make a person stay.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Copyist
Starry Night over the Rhône
At night, by gaslight, before the night sky, he painted the night. That alone should not be left out.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
The Yellow House
The imagination he spent on the Yellow House lasted far longer than the house itself.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Night Café
"It is one of the ugliest pictures I have done." Those are his own words, from the letter.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Gauguin Arrives
Two painters look at the same scene and paint two completely different worlds. This matters more than what came after — but what came after covered it over.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Ferocious Reader
The Bedroom
He painted the same room three times: once living inside it, twice already gone.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
La Berceuse
He kept designing what others would feel on seeing his pictures — only the "others" grew harder and harder to have present.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Copyist
Gauguin Leaves
After that night, Arles was, in a sense, over. Soon after leaving the hospital he picked up the brush again.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Irises
He made work a way of holding himself together. This is almost not a metaphor.
- The Colour Experimenter
- The Translator
Cypresses
He did not find the tree first in his letters; he caught up to it, in the letters, as he painted.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Olive Groves
He had to get the tree right first. So he painted, among the olive trees, over and over.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Starry Night
About his most famous picture, he himself said little. Both of these things are true at once.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Wheat Fields
He said he wanted to paint consolation, but what he painted was wind.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
The Saint-Rémy Copies
Within his confinement, by copying others, he discovered who he now was.
- The Copyist
- The Translator
The Hospital Garden
He was shut into a small place, and then he looked at that small place utterly.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Almond Blossom
It was something he gave away, not something kept to be looked at — and that should not be left out.
- The Translator
- The Copyist
The Seventy Days of Auvers
Seventy days, more than eighty paintings. Not a slow ending, but an ever-denser one.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
The Church at Auvers
The forking road is solid in the painting, never mentioned in the letters. The colour is not naturalistic — and yet truer than naturalism.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Doctor Gachet
His doctor appears in his painting, wearing the same expression as himself.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter
Thatched Cottages
In his final stretch he began to paint the shapes of his early years — only the colours were entirely different.
- The Colour Experimenter
- Synaesthetic Precision
Daubigny's Garden
He added that black cat — but why, no one is sure.
- The Copyist
- The Colour Experimenter
Rain over Auvers
The angle at which those lines fall is already speaking, and needs no explanation.
- Synaesthetic Precision
- The Colour Experimenter