My project this week is to copy one of Van Gogh's paintings.  As a warm-up I chose one of his drawings to study, attempting to enter his mind a bit, how he interpreted the world and distilled it in his artwork.  His drawing style in his later years is what appealed to me.  After two years in Paris, Vincent longed for "some place of retreat," arriving in Arles in February 1888.  His devotion to the land, those who worked it, his "longing for the infinite, of which the sower, the sheaf are the symbols," led to the creation of many drawings and paintings of the harvest in the summer of 1888.  Over the years Van Gogh had developed a shorthand, the invention of a mark-making which he organised into patterns that later he used to convey color and texture with his oil pigments.  He utilised linear demarcations, hard contour lines, directional hatchmarks, stippling, curvilinear strokes, very graphical marks.  

In the drawing "Farmhouse in Provence," which Van Gogh did in early June 1888, Vincent's tools were reed pen and ink over graphite.  I opened my new set of Faber&Castell sepia artist pens, doing a quick practice of making marks with the four pens (superfine, fine, medium, brush).  The drawing was more difficult and took me longer than I anticipated, and still I did not do it justice, leaving out many of the grasses, getting lost in some of my spaces and proportions.  But an effort well worth making.  After establishing some important landmarks and intensely trying to "copy" what Van Gogh had drawn, I began to feel the energy of his marks, the expression in them and purpose, that he wasn't trying to get down exactly what was there but more what he felt personally upon seeing the scene in front of him.  His fervent desire to express this are in every mark. And that's really the point.  We study the masters to learn their techniques and then building on their foundation let them go to allow our own voice be illustrated through the tools we have learned.

Now to the painting...

Images below include the drawing and painting "Farmhouse in Provence," Vincent Van Gogh, June 1888

Quoted material from "Dear Theo:  The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh."

Our world is so chaotic at the moment, and I find that time and again I return to the theme of personal stillness and quiet, seeking ourselves in a world that is pulling us in so many directions.   This is the concept I wanted to develop in “Boundless Sea,” those moments when we pause with ourselves, surrounded by nature…truly pause, get off the wheel which the Buddhists call “Samsara.”  It’s when we let our minds go in its most free state to whatever seascapes, landscapes, ‘scapes within us and without us.  We’re refreshed in those moments, reborn at times, found in others.  And those first times in our lives when we do that, when we’re oh so young, they’re momentous because they open ourselves to what’s possible inside and outside.

I welcome your thoughts.

“Self is a sea boundless and measureless.”  Kahlil Gibran