Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings • Hacker News Board

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#101

Post by stevesimmons » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

isaacfrond wrote: post #39

mav88 wrote: post #31

I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.

Next time your in the Netherlands, check out the Kröller-Müller museum. Its collection was created by an art lover who was one of the first to appreciate van Gogh. Although its collection is a bit smaller than that of the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, it is, I think, of a higher quality.

Kroller-Muller also has a great Mondriaan collection. Mondriaan's later coloured geometric paintings really make sense when you see his early landscapes with trees, and then a period experimenting with thinning out trees focusing on the branches and spaces between them.

The museum also has a fun sculpture garden.

[1] https://krollermuller.nl/en/search-the-collection/keywords=%...

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#102

Post by bloomingeek » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #91

deeg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, his paintings are so thick . Photos don't allow you to see how the paint was applied on top of other paint. Seeing them in person allowed me to understand that Van Gogh attacked his canvas.

Destitute outcast dressed in rags. But he could afford to slather his canvases deep with that pricey oil paint. And don't get me started on storage space. Those paintings take up room. Maybe he had a trustfund. Maybe he spent 99% on art supplies and 1% on potatoes. I dunno.

Actually he had a brother and other relatives who sponsored him. They knew he had some kind of mental illness and basically kept him at a distance. They loved him, but he was a handful.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#103

Post by shrx » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

mav88 wrote: post #31

I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.

> They look like they were painted yesterday.

Actually, some of the pigments van Gogh used have significantly faded or shifted in color over time. https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#104

Post by cwbrandsma » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

mav88 wrote: post #31

I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.

I was there last month…my goodness it was busy. So many people. Go early if you can.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#105

Post by turtledragonfly » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

I like this collection because of how much there is to see. Van Gogh was more prolific than I had somehow imagined.

There are different kinds of artists, and one kind (that I identify with) does it because of some semi-compulsion. It's not "oh, I think I'll do some art today, wouldn't that be nice?" but rather "I _need_ to make something; I will not feel right until I do. Where's my paint?" These are the ones who would keep producing even if nobody ever saw their work.

I guess that jives with my understanding of Van Gogh's history. Not a commercial success, not sought-after. But he did it anyway.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#106

Post by AtNightWeCode » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:25 PM UTC

I recommend this museum. It did not give me the same jaw-dropping experience as staring into Starry Night at MOMA. But it is a great museum and it spans over the entire life of Van Gogh, his development and tools. There is also a lot humor and distance in the descriptions which makes the experience less dark considering all the misery in his life.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#107

Post by gdubs » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

So, I wasn't really sure about the final season of Ted Lasso until the episode "Sunflowers". I won't go in to detail as to what the relevance here is in case you haven't seen it, but I thought it was just simply beautiful.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#108

Post by toyg » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

diego_moita wrote: post #36

mav88 wrote: post #31

I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because I was there and it was on the bucket list. Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life. Plus, in the days before additional security was required, you could go right up to them (within reason) and check them out up close. They look like they were painted yesterday. Not everyone likes his work but I'm a fan.

> Pictures in a book or on web pages do not do justice to how vibrant the pictures are in real life This is true and big. The paintings are nice on books and screens but are stunning in real life. There is a lot of nuance in the colours that pictures don't replicate. Same happens to Vermeer landscapes. His "View of Delft" is just nice on screen but almost magical when seen in real.

I've just visited the Detroit Institute of Arts (which is excellent, by the way; a revelation to this cynical and displaced Italian). They have a fairly unknown (at least to me) 1873 painting titled Syria by the Sea, by Frederic Edwin Church. It's a capriccio, an imaginary landscape mixing ruins of various civilization, at sunset. On a screen or a page, it's just another bucolic landscape; but its size and colors are such that, in real life, it's simply a glorious experience.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#109

Post by spaceman_2020 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

jamal-kumar wrote: post #44

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #18

For an art noob, can someone help me understand why the perspective is off in so many of them? I know that he's a master and I don't want to contest that, but the perspective being off feels a little...amateurish? Or is that an intentional choice? If it is, would love to know the 'why' of it

I don't really think I got it until I saw one in person. It was only a faily small piece but the guy really gobbed so much paint on there that it looked like the flowers on it were real and sticking out of the painting. It was really quite impressive and I don't think I've seen anything quite like it since. I think you could probably label the whole field of post-impressionism as just being smudgy or whatever, and it…

I did not understand modern art until I saw it in the way people from that era would have seen it. I was on Day 7 of a vacation in St. Petersburg and we'd gone from gallery to gallery for nearly a week, covering art from the 14th century onwards.

After about the 10,000th realistic painting with vaguely mythological/religious themes, it was simply exhausting. And then we entered a room that housed Matisse's 'The Conversation' and it took my breath away.

A gigantic, bright blue painting in an old Russian palace after a week of gallery hopping...it was absolutely majestic. I can only imagine the impact something like that must have had on people who had known nothing but the same old realistic style.

What throws me about Van Gogh, though, is that unlike Matisse, he's not entirely modern or abstract - he's still trying to capture some semblance of reality, and he's even making an attempt at realistic perspective, but something is just off. I admire the style, but I could never come to grips with what he's trying to do (or not trying to do) with his perspectives.

Re: Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings

#110

Post by toyg » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

turtledragonfly wrote: post #105

I like this collection because of how much there is to see. Van Gogh was more prolific than I had somehow imagined. There are different kinds of artists, and one kind (that I identify with) does it because of some semi-compulsion. It's not "oh, I think I'll do some art today, wouldn't that be nice?" but rather "I _need_ to make something; I will not feel right until I do. Where's my paint?" These are the ones who wou…

Bit of both here. Definitely Van Gogh painted largely because he wanted to, but at the same time, the people helping him were constantly reminding him of the commercial necessities of the art, pushing him to produce more in this or that fashionable style.