Well, my friendlies, I just realized it’s Friday and I have not posted anything related to my internship this week. That’s because I had no internship this week. My supervisor is in Beliz with her husband. That being said, I thought I would take this opportunity to write more about my independent research project. I posted an entry earlier this week, but, what the heck, I’ll do another one.
If you’ve been following all of my blog posts, and possibly my instagram, you’ll know that I’ve been posted something called “The Van Gogh Project.”
My aunt asked me to paint a reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Cafe Terrace at Night” that she may hang it in her dining room.
Wanting to do a good job, I decided to study the artwork and Van Gogh much more extensively. I thought by getting to know the man better, I would be able to bring his painting to life in a way that would allow my aunt and anyone she invites over to get a feel for the real man.
I bought a poster of the piece because having a high quality poster shows the brushstrokes much better than any image in the internet can. I also didn’t want to paint in my own style as my style uses only the smallest amounts of paint at a time (paint’s expensive, I generally want to make it last as long as possible), and I have a tendency to blend, worse, over blend the paint on my canvas. Van Gogh and I are opposites in many ways.
He separates his colors, I blend mine. He uses a lot of paint, I use as little as I can. The Van Gogh project is every bit breaking my own habits as learning the techniques of one of my giants.
Turns out, I was right. In a letter to his sister, Van Gogh specifically explained his pride in being able to recreate the sky in the painting without using any black.
A couple days ago, I myself went a little mad.
I was attempting to study logic, and I was just not getting it. Finally, I marched downstairs and picked up the paintbrush. I started a little earlier than I wanted to, but I finally took paint to the canvas I purchased:
I put globs of paint on the canvas, like the impressionists did, and went to work. I just needed the right yellow to put on the stars.
I got Yellow Ochre for the stars (I can’t believe I didn’t have it already), I saw a lot of Indian Yellow in the painting, so I went ahead and got that too.
If you haven’t seen it already, here’s a video of me analyzing the poster I got as my reference:
I’m currently in the process of finishing a video doing some brushstroke experiments. Please follow me on YouTube or Vidme for updates.
Ash Meyer Art 