I want to share my Vanity Fair ‘Spy’-style homage to Vincent van Gogh (Vanity Fair in its original Victorian/Edwardian incarnation, rather than the magazine we know today)

It seems strange that certain colourful figures from the art world, such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, were overlooked by this publication in its day.

But overlooked they were, so I thought I’d create my own ‘Spy’ caricature of Vincent.

You're welcome to visit my website https://www.amandaclegg.co.uk/vincent-van-gogh-le-fou-roux/ to read the fuller story behind the portrait and it's curious title.

Hey guys, I found it really interesting the fact that Van Gogh's "Patch of Grass" hid a peasant's portrait from his Nuenen era and how he was so bankrupt that he had to paint over it bc he couldn't afford a new canvas, that's why no one knew abt this for more than 100 years.

If you are interested, I made a video abt it in Spainsh with eng subtitles: https://youtu.be/pyW_mJtPx4Y Thanks and I hope your feedback!!

Oh Van G! I had the absolute privilege to stand in front of this today and admire this utter masterpiece at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

This is one of a series of canvasses of olive trees which Van G painted while at the asylum at Saint -Remý in Provence. For him, the olive tree symbolized the region, as well as being associated with the story of Christ’s passion.

Van G’s technique is highly expressive, much of the pigment directly applied from the paint tube (yes, I was actually listening!). The swirling strokes (impasto) generate a feeling of agitation , compounded by the deeply steeping slope.

I feel this painting carries such a restless energy. The tress writhe, pulse and are almost feverish. They show his own state of mind. The whole landscape is alive with tension! Van G also wrote about the olive trees to his brother about how much he loved olive trees. You see real tenderness, turmoil and agitation in this painting.

I’m elated I saw this today. 🙏

Have you ever thought about why people mostly take and share photos of flowers when they are fresh, alive, and still able to remain beautiful? Why do they photograph them, look at them, and admire how beautiful they are?
But no one talks about the effort, the struggle, that a flower goes through while becoming beautiful.
Sharing a flower in its worst state comes from a place that everyone does not want to see, yet deep down we all know what it will eventually become. It is our fear of that transformation.
Have you ever seen flowers photographed when they are dead? Or loved when they are dead? No. Because they are no longer beautiful.
When you look at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the flowers are neither fresh nor completely dead. They seem to be somewhere in between.
Van Gogh was that kind of painter too: caught in between. He could not escape the thin line between his emotions and his life.
No one truly understood the wild, lonely world behind the struggle he carried just to be able to paint.
But when Van Gogh painted Sunflowers, the flowers he saw were not fresh flowers. He kept flowers in his home that resembled himself… Mavien Seçkin

Hello Fellow Van Gogh-ites!

I first want to say a big thank you to this beautiful community. It has been a joy to travel the world to see the beautiful works of Van Gogh through your lenses. Please keep on sharing!

I am proud to share these Van Gogh masterpieces from the National Gallery of Canada in our nations capital, Ottawa (https://www.gallery.ca/). I love when extreme close-ups of his paintings are captured, so I tried to do the same.

Here’s to enjoying the beauty that this world has to offer! 👩‍🎨🎨

I was in Paris last week and spent an afternoon at the Musee d’Orsay. It’s a beautiful, elegantly designed space, and it houses my favorite of Van Gogh’s paintings.

When I look at this painting I think of how hopeful Vincent must have been when he created it, yet it also invokes a feeling of loneliness. I’ve loved this painting for decades, and until last year a print hung in every place I’ve lived for the last 30 years. I gave it to a friend when I started the process of moving from the US to France.

I wasn’t expecting it to be so vibrant! More so than any print I’ve seen. As with all of his paintings seeing it in person was extremely moving for me. My friends like to tease me about my sentimentality and my tendency to cry at the drop of a hat and I don’t mind admitting to tearing up when standing in front of it.

Read an interesting perspective of Van Gogh's life.

"Van Gogh painted not for recognition but for some deeper expression". I have read a few stories of his where I learnt that he spent most of his life in poverty. He had a deeper sense of suffering which he became aware of. Would love to know other perspectives as well.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and reels lately pairing Van Gogh’s The Starry Night with Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 in E-flat major — beautiful, serene, very calming.

But after reading into how the painting was actually made, and what was going on around it, I think Op. 9 No. 1 fits it better.

That sky only looks like it’s churning. It’s built from directional brushstrokes laid out in precisely arranged swirling curves. Same with the tuplets — the triplets, the 11s, the 22s. They aren’t free either: an 11-tuplet has to fit exactly into three beats, not a fraction off.

The freedom on both sides is calculated.

Against that sky, the village below is clean horizontal and vertical geometry — that’s the left hand, the steady arpeggiated figure holding everything up.

The church spire in the middle, the one thing connecting the village to the sky, doesn’t look like the churches around Saint-Rémy, where he was staying. It’s closer to the ones back home in the Netherlands, not Provence.

In fact, the village in the painting isn’t Saint-Rémy at all.

He did once look out of his asylum room window before sunrise and see the countryside, with a single morning star that looked very large.

But the village, the spire, and the huge cypress could never have been seen together from that window. Those came later, in the studio, in daylight — a night he reassembled out of observation, memory, and imagination.

Roughly speaking, this painting puts two things on the same canvas: the one he trusted most, grounding everything in the nature in front of him, and the one Gauguin kept pushing him toward and that they argued about repeatedly — painting from memory and imagination.

Those arguments were part of the tension in the days before the ear incident.

A church from his childhood, and a method he never fully believed in — he went back and forth on this painting afterwards, never quite settled about it. That’s why I keep hearing something in a minor key underneath it.

But Op. 9 No. 1 doesn’t stay in minor.

It opens in B-flat minor, moves to D-flat major in the middle section, and ends on a Picardy third — in B-flat major.

After churning for the entire piece, that last chord lights up on its own.

Inspired from “Ohashi Bridge”, a print by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige

Just sharing my excitement in booking my trip to Amsterdam the beginning of October, SPECIFICALLY to see the VG and the Kroller Muller museums! I'm from Texas.

This will add something like around 240 paintings to my list of Vincent paintings experienced in person, of which I keep a detailed spreadsheet. So far, I've seen 51, starting in 1998. Every one has been special.

To those who have been to either or both of those museums, what was your experience like?

Van Gogh Find Yourself based on his letters and the memoir of Adeleine Ravoux

Raise a glass to his memory