Vincent van Gogh

   There are a few reasons on why I chose Vincent van Gogh. I decided to choose him because back in elementary school each person in my class had to pick an artist and choose one of their paintings/drawings and then create their own version of that painting/drawing using whatever they wanted. So, I had chosen...



Starry Night

When we were given this post to write I knew exactly who I was going to pick not only because of this elementary school project, but also because I can relate to his sunflowers. My dad is a glass artist, he sculpts things out of glass and incases them into clear glass making paperweights. One of his many designs was inspired by one of van Gogh’s paintings. He had always put sunflowers into his artwork, but then decided to add something to make it similar to van Gogh’s famous painting, “Sunflowers”. Putting the vase in with the sunflowers, he made this paperweight naming it, “van Gogh’s Sunflower Bouquet.”

Sunflowers

http://www.davidgraeber.com/

Background Information

Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, and died July 29, 1890. He was born in Zundert, The Netherlands. His dad was a protestant minister, something that Van Gogh found appealing and wanted to look into later in his life. His sister described him as a, “serious and introspective child.” When he was 16 he started to work for the art dealer Goupil & C. His younger brother Theo, who Van Gogh thought of as a lifelong friend, would join the company later on. Theo and Van Gogh used to write letters to each other and those letters showed him to be a talented writer.

Theo would support Vincent financially throughout his life. In 1873, his firm transferred him to London, then to Paris. He became interested in religion in 1876. Then, Goupil dismissed him for lack of work. He became a teaching assistant and after he dropped out of that in 1878, he then became a layman preacher in Belgium in a poor mining region. He would even preach down in the mines and he was extremely concerned about the people. He was dismissed after 6 months and continued without pay, but during this period he started charcoal sketches. In 1880 Van Gogh listened to his brother and took up painting. For a brief period of time Van Gogh took painting lessons. He then moved in with his brothers and soon found it to be too much. When he moved to France he was real inspired by their landscape and started to do some of his paintings.

During his lifetime he had about 900 paintings and 1100 drawings. These were all done within 10 years before he got a mental illness which could have possibly been a bipolar disorder leading to himself committing suicide. After his death he rapidly became famous and on March 17^th, 1901 (11 years after his death) they were showing 71 of Van Gogh's paintings in Paris. I find it interesting that throughout his entire lifetime he only sold one painting, The Red Vineyard, which was created in 1888 and is now on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia.