Who is Vincent van Gogh and what has he done in his life? Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853. He was a son of a Dutch minister and the eldest of his siblings and he was struggling financially throughout his entire life. Van Gogh has always been interested in art and it was a passion for him ever since he was young. Once he had turned of age, he had left his mother and father’s house to move with his cousin which was a directing Hague School artist and Van Gogh chose to personally learn under his wing. He has been to two schools throughout his life to learn how to be an artist, the two schools were the Royal Academy of fine arts and Willem II college. Van Gogh’s first goal was to master black and white, then learn to master colors. Soon he then focused on working on landscapes or rural paintings and finding a correct way render them properly. After he achieved his goal he ventured into the art of watercolors and oil paintings. His first winnings as an artist inspired him more and he wanted to further continue being an artist. Van Gogh had been inspired by Barbizon artists and it influenced him to have a rural style of art. Van Gogh’s art wasn’t very popular when he was alive, in fact he was not a well known person, and his art only became well known because of his death and from that point on his arts became famous after death. He died by a gunshot wound to the abdomen where he bled out and died. It had either been others that had killed him or he commited suicide, some reasons why he might of commited suicide was because of his mental illnesses and his financial issues. His life conditions often made him depressed, in some paintings he used warm, saturated colors as relief. He even states “I am rather uneasy in my mind… because my life has not been calm enough”
Van Gogh is associated with the post impressionism, pointillism, realism, and neo impressionism movements. He was slow to pick up with these types of movements because he had been studying earlier arts. Most of his arts were post impressionists painting which was noted for its color, beauty, and emotion. His emotions were attached with his paintings and he made many expressionist paintings as well.
In most of van gogh’s works of arts, he uses rural characteristics, for example landscapes, plants, and farms. His inspiration was rural art so he created rural arts and focused mainly on that.. He usually used a thick paint mixed with oil called impasta which was so thick that the brush strokes would be clearly visible on a canvas. He didn’t lightly use a paint brush, he would put a lot of pressure on it.
Vincent van Gogh is mostly known as the best dutch painter even though he didn’t become famous till after he died. A part that makes him significant was his brush strokes and how thick he would make them and another part was because of his mental state which made his paintings more dramatic and unique. His expressionism art movement was also rare and he used great color schemes and you could tell from his paintings that he was very rough with the painting brush and it gives it another great quality. Not anyone can simply achieve the same style as Van Gogh which made his paintings worth more in value.
One significant work that inspired my project the Wheatfield with Crows that was made in july 1890. I think it is one of his best works of art because i love how he blends in the colors so nicely and the pattern, the majority of the painting is based off of a dash of a line. The wheatfield is composed and made of lines, as well as the sky and the dirt path. Another reason i liked this work was because of how smoothly Van Gogh blended the sky and it makes the moon pop out more and it directs your attention more towards it, and the path is leading towards the moon as well giving more attention to the center. When I was painting my own Wheatfield with Crows, it was not easy at all, in fact it was really hard to blend in the lines with a stroke at a time and at the same time i was also trying to keep the same pattern. Blending the sky with the ground was also difficult and making the middle path seem like it keeps going and it hits the moon was another challenge.