![]() |
Courtesy of www.VincentVanGogh.org |
Last Saturday night I tackled something I have often dreamt about.
It is a view of flat, green fields with haycocks. A cinder track with a canal alongside it runs straight across it. And on the horizon, in the middle of the painting, the sun sets in a fiery red glow. I cannot possibly draw the effect in a hurry, but you can see the composition here. But it was altogether a question of color and tone, the hues of a spectrum of colors of the sky, first a violet haze - in which the red sun was half hidden by a dark purple cloud with a thin, brilliantly red border; near the sun were reflections of vermilion, but above it a band of yellow that turned into green, and higher up a shade of blue, the so-called cerulean blue, and then here and there lilac and gray clouds, catching reflections from the sun.
The ground was a kind of tapestry of green, gray, and brown, but full of patterning and bristling with movement - the water in the ditch sparkles in that multihued ground.
I have also painted a large piece of duneland-pasted on and painted thickly.
Of these two, of the small seascape and the potato field, I am convinced that no one would think that these were my first painted studies.
To tell you the truth, it surprises me a little; I thought my first efforts would look like nothing on earth and might improve later, but although I say so myself, they definitely look like something, and that surprises me a little.
I believe it is because I have spent so much time drawing and studying the perspective before I started painting that I was able to put what I saw together.
I have literally been unable to stop myself, I could not let go or take a rest.
There is some sense of color emerging in me that I never had before, something that is wide-ranging and powerful.
MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS
Vincent van Gogh's Letters
The Starry Night
Café Terrace at Night
Sunflowers
Self Portrait
Irise
Starry Night over the Rhone
Almond Blossom
Wheatfield with Crows
Tree Roots