A Language Barrier

Yesterday I promised that study of the self-portrait...today I am failing to fulfill it. I did finish the study, but it doesn't flatter Vincent or me. My goal in doing it was to try and get an understanding of what he was going for.

You see, I read somewhere, about his self-portraits:

• that the anatomy is different in each one (intentionally I presume - because he was a draughtsman)
• this was due to his desire to represent himself differently to different people.

And more generally,

• he was trying to give an impression, rather than realism in his work
• his stroke work was intentional, he wanted that barrier between art and life.

OK, so I figured the green face was trying to tell me something. (The print I drew from had stronger greens and blues than this image.) So, try as I might, with each stroke, I racked my brain about what he was telling me. But, I confess, I just didn't get it. I don't know what he was trying to say, or how he was trying to represent himself.

So, I decided that was the end of my Van Gogh study. Then, as I was falling asleep last night, I thought about doing something with his color choices. In the end, I came up with this still-life (the image isn't cropped well-the blank at the top should be ignored :-). It has the deep blue, orange-red, and sage green that his portrait has. I didn't want it to have a polished/smooth blending feel to the pencil strokes(which it doesn't), but I couldn't find a way to "translate" his emotive brush into colored pencil. Looking at it, there isn't much Vincent there, but it was an attempt to honor someone that everyone else finds so alluring.

This still-life will be the end of my Van Gogh study for the month. I have some other things that I want to get underway before there is an artist to study for March!