Creating A Major Drawing

Still life

A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, plants and natural substances like rocks) or man-made (drinking glasses, cigarettes, pipes, hotdogs and so on) in an artificial setting. Popular in Western art since the 17th century, still life paintings give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture.

History

Still life paintings often adorn the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. It was believed that food objects and other items depicted there would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Similar paintings, more simply decorative in intent, have also been found in the Roman frescoes unearthed at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale. Some Roman wall paintings already depict the later familiar motif of a glass bowl of fruit. The popular appreciation of still life painting as a demonstration of the artist's skill is related in the ancient Greek legend of Zeuxis and Parrhasius.

Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, still life in Western art was mainly used as an adjunct to Christian religious subjects. This was particularly true in the work of Northern European artists, whose fascination with highly detailed optical realism and disguised symbolism led them to lavish great attention on the meanings of various props and settings within their paintings' overall message. Painters such as Jan van Eyck often used objects, such as those considered still life elements, as part of an iconographic program.

Still life after 1600

Still life painting thrived in Italy during the early Baroque[1], yet it remained historically less respected than "grand manner" painting of historical, religious, and mythic subjects. Prominent Academicians of the early 1600s, like Andrea Sacchi, felt that genre and still life painting did not carry the "gravitas" merited for painting to be considered great. On the other hand, successful Italian still life artists found ample patronage in their day[2]. One additional fact is that before the 17th century, women painters, few as they were, commonly chose or were restricted to painting topics such as still lifes[3].

Still life came into its own in the new artistic climate of the Netherlands in the 17th century (with the name stilleven: still life is a calque while Romance languages tend to use terms such as dead nature). While artists found limited opportunity to produce the religious iconography which had long been their staple—images of religious subjects were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church—the continuing Northern tradition of detailed realism and hidden symbols appealed to the growing Dutch middle classes, who were replacing Church and State as the principal patrons of art in the Netherlands.

Especially popular in this period were vanitas paintings, in which sumptuous arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, were accompanied by symbolic reminders of life's impermanence. A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down or a book with pages turning, would serve as a moralizing message on the ephemerality of sensory pleasures. Often some of the fruits and flowers themselves would be shown starting to spoil or fade. The popularity of vanitas paintings, and of still life generally, soon spread from Holland to Flanders and from there to Spain[4] and France.

Still life painting in Spain, also called bodegones, was austere; it differed from the Dutch still parallels, which often contain both rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric or glass. The game is often plain dead animals still waiting to be skinned. The fruits and vegetables are uncooked. The backgrounds are bleak or plain wood geometric blocks, often creating a surrealist air. Even while both Dutch and Spanish still lifes often had an embedded moral purpose, the austerity, which some find akin to a hair shirt fashion or the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, appears to reject the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of Dutch still life paintings.

The French aristocracy of the 18th century also employed artists to execute paintings of bounteous and extravagant still life subjects, this time without the moralistic vanitas message of their Dutch predecessors. The Rococo love of artifice led to a rise in appreciation for trompe l'oeil (French: "trick the eye") painting, a type of still life in which objects are shown life-sized, against a flat background, in an attempt to create the illusion of real three dimensional objects in the viewer's space.

With the rise of the European Academies, most notably the Académie française which held a central role in Academic art, and their formalized approach to artistic training, still life began to fall from favor. The Academies taught the doctrine of "Hierarchy of genres" (or "Hierarchy of Subject Matter"), which held that a painting's artistic merit was based primarily on its subject. In the Academic system, the highest form of painting consisted of images of historical, Biblical or mythological significance, with still life subjects relegated to the very lowest order of artistic recognition.

Modern still life painting

It was not until the decline of the Academic hierarchy in Europe, and the rise of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, who emphasized technique and design over subject matter, that still life was once again avidly practiced by artists. Henri Fantin-Latour is known almost exclusively for his still lifes. Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" are some of the best known 19th century still life paintings, and Paul Cézanne found in still life the perfect vehicle for his revolutionary explorations in geometric spatial organization.

Indeed, Cézanne's experiments can be seen as leading directly to the development of Cubist still life in the early 20th century. Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris painted many still life compositions, often including musical instruments, as well as creating the first Synthetic Cubist collage works, such as Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912).

Artists in the United States, largely unburdened by Academic strictures on subject matter, had long found a ready market for still life painting. Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), eldest son of Revolutionary era painter Charles Willson Peale, was the first American still life specialist, and established a tradition of still life painting in Philadelphia that continued until the early 20th century, when artists such as William Harnett and John Frederick Peto gained fame for their trompe l'oeil renderings of collections of worn objects and scraps of paper, typically shown hanging on a wall or door.

When 20th century American artists became aware of European Modernism, they began to interpret still life subjects with a combination of American realism and Cubist-derived abstraction. Typical of the American still life works of this period are the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley, and the photographs of Edward Weston.

Much Pop Art (such as Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans") is based on still life, but its true subject is most often the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still life object itself. The rise of Photorealism in the 1970s reasserted illusionistic representation, while retaining some of Pop's message of the fusion of object, image, and commercial product. Typical in this regard are the paintings of Don Eddy and Ralph Goings.

Experimental pieces

Paint

A Lesson on Perspective & The Cube..

This lesson we masted perspective and the Cube. Simple, Yet effective.

Perspective (from Latin perspicere, to see through) in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is perceived by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn:

- Smaller as their distance from the observer increases

- Foreshortened: the size of an object's dimensions along the line of sight are relatively shorter than dimensions across the line of sight.

The Cube

A cube[1] is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and of 3-sided trapezohedron. The cube is dual to the octahedron. It has cubical symmetry (also called octahedral symmetry). A cube is the three-dimensional case of the more general concept of a hypercube, which exists in any dimension.

Regular Hexahedron

The cube is unique among the Platonic solids for being able to tile space regularly. It is also unique among the Platonic solids in having faces with an even number of sides and, consequently, it is the only member of that group that is a zonohedron (every face has point symmetry).

Compound of Three Cubes

An Aternately truncated cube

Related polyhedra

The vertices of a cube can be grouped into two groups of four, each forming a regular tetrahedron. These two together form a regular compound, the stella octangula. The intersection of the two forms a regular octahedron. The symmetries of a regular tetrahedron correspond to those of a cube which map each tetrahedron to itself; the other symmetries of the cube map the two to each other.

One such regular tetrahedron has a volume of ⅓ of that of the cube. The remaining space consists of four equal irregular polyhedra with a volume of 1/6 of that of the cube, each.
The rectified cube is the cuboctahedron. If smaller corners are cut off we get a polyhedron with 6 octagonal faces and 8 triangular ones. In particular we can get regular octagons (truncated cube). The rhombicuboctahedron is obtained by cutting off both corners and edges to the correct amount.

A cube can be inscribed in a

dodecahedron so that each vertex of the cube is a vertex of the dodecahedron and each edge is a diagonal of one of the dodecahedron's faces; taking all such cubes gives rise to the regular compound of five cubes.

Perspective

A cube in two-point perspective.

Perspective works by representing the light that passes from a scene through an imaginary rectangle (the painting or photograph), to the viewer's eye. It is similar to a viewer looking through a window and painting what is seen directly onto the windowpane. If viewed from the same spot as the windowpane was painted, the painted image would be identical to what was seen through the unpainted window. Each painted object in the scene is a flat, scaled down version of the object on the other side of the window.[1] Because each portion of the painted object lies on the straight line from the viewer's eye to the equivalent portion of the real object it represents, the viewer cannot perceive (sans depth perception) any difference between the painted scene on the windowpane and the view of the real scene.

Related concepts:
Some concepts that are commonly associated with perspective include:
foreshortening (see later)
horizon line
vanishing points

All perspective drawings assume a viewer is a certain distance away from the drawing. Objects are scaled relative to that viewer. Additionally, an object is often not scaled evenly: a circle often appears as an ellipse and a square can appear as a trapezoid. This distortion is referred to as foreshortening.
Perspective drawings typically have an—often implied—horizon line. This line, directly opposite the viewer's eye, represents objects infinitely far away. They have shrunk, in the distance, to the infinitesimal thickness of a line. It is analogous to (and named after) the Earth's horizon.

Any perspective representation of a scene that includes parallel lines has one or more vanishing points in a perspective drawing. A one-point perspective drawing means that the drawing has a single vanishing point, usually (though not necessarily) directly opposite the viewer's eye and usually (though not necessarily) on the horizon line. All lines parallel with the viewer's line of sight recede to the horizon towards this vanishing point. This is the standard "receding railroad tracks" phenomenon. A two-point drawing would have lines parallel to two different angles. Any number of vanishing points are possible in a drawing, one for each set of parallel lines that are at an angle relative to the plane of the drawing. A master in this thing was Johannes Vermeer

Perspectives consisting of many parallel lines are observed most often when drawing architecture (architecture frequently uses lines parallel to the x, y, and z axes). Because it is rare to have a scene consisting solely of lines parallel to the three Cartesian axes (x, y, and z), it is rare to see perspectives in practice with only one, two, or three vanishing points; even a simple house frequently has a peaked roof which results in a minimum of six sets of parallel lines, in turn corresponding to up to six vanishing points.
In contrast, natural scenes often do not have any sets of parallel lines. Such a perspective would thus have no vanishing points.

Rays of light travel from the object, through the picture plane, and to the viewer's eye. This is the basis for graphical perspective.

One-point perspective

One vanishing point is typically used for roads, railroad tracks, or buildings viewed so that the front is directly facing the viewer. Any objects that are made up of lines either directly parallel with the viewer's line of sight or directly perpendicular (the railroad slats) can be represented with one-point perspective.

One-point perspective exists when the painting plate (also known as the picture plane) is parallel to two axes of a rectilinear (or Cartesian) scene — a scene which is composed entirely of linear elements that intersect only at right angles. If one axis is parallel with the picture plane, then all elements are either parallel to the painting plate (either horizontally or vertically) or perpendicular to it. All elements that are parallel to the painting plate are drawn as parallel lines. All elements that are perpendicular to the painting plate converge at a single point (a vanishing point) on the horizon. Two-point perspective

Two-point perspective can be used to draw the same objects as one-point perspective, rotated: looking at the corner of a house, or looking at two forked roads shrink into the distance, for example. One point represents one set of parallel lines, the other point represents the other. Looking at a house from the corner, one wall would recede towards one vanishing point, the other wall would recede towards the opposite vanishing point.

Two-point perspective exists when the painting plate is parallel to a Cartesian scene in one axis (usually the z-axis) but not to the other two axes. If the scene being viewed consists solely of a cylinder sitting on a horizontal plane, no difference exists in the image of the cylinder between a one-point and two-point perspective.

Three-point perspective

Three-point perspective is usually used for buildings seen from above (or below). In addition to the two vanishing points from before, one for each wall, there is now one for how those walls recede into the ground. This third vanishing point will be below the ground. Looking up at a tall building is another common example of the third vanishing point. This time the third vanishing point is high in space.

Three-point perspective exists when the perspective is a view of a Cartesian scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's three axes. Each of the three vanishing points corresponds with one of the three axes of the scene. Image constructed using multiple vanishing points.

One-point, two-point, and three-point perspectives appear to embody different forms of calculated perspective. The methods required to generate these perspectives by hand are different. Mathematically, however, all three are identical: The difference is simply in the relative orientation of the rectilinear scene to the viewer.

Zero-point perspective

Due to the fact that vanishing points exist only when parallel lines are present in the scene, a perspective without any vanishing points ("zero-point" perspective) occurs if the viewer is observing a nonlinear scene. The most common example of a nonlinear scene is a natural scene (e.g., a mountain range) which frequently does not contain any parallel lines. A perspective without vanishing points can still create a sense of "depth," as is clearly apparent in a photograph of a mountain range (more distant mountains have smaller scale features).

My drawing showing perspective.

Sheet handed out in class.

The Art of Drawing Faces

We began our task by drawing a series of three face images, focusing on one or two element of the face. Although the drawings i drew look extreemly mediocre, it gave the the opportunity to have a real play with each face, and get the chance to test different styles of parts of the face. It also gave me the chance to get differnt perspectives on shape and line work on a face.


The second part of the task consisted of drawing the side of a face, with no detail of eyes, ears nose or mouth etc.. and detail our current thoughts in the centre of the brain. It made us think hard about what was going through our brains at the time, and give detail, which is quite a challenge at times.



The third part of the task consisted of choosing one of the following faces, and drawing a companion. I chose the face of the second line, third. However i didn't draw a companion for this face, i chose to iterpret the face in my own way. The face really appealed to me, so i thought i would have a go. We used black ink, and a stick found in the garden.

This was my final piece. I really enjoyed this task, it was really intersting and educational.

Ink and stick.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.[1][2] His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitchcock's film Spellbound.
Dalí insisted on his "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors who occupied Southern Spain for nearly 800 years (711-1492), and attributed to these origins, "my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes."[3]
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.[4] The purposefully-sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

The Persistence of Memory (1931) is one of Dalí's most famous works

La persistencia de la memoria (1931) or The Persistence of Memory is one of the most famous paintings by artist Salvador Dalí. The painting has also been popularly known as Soft Watches, Droopy Watches, The Persistence of Time or Melting Clocks.

The well-known surrealistic piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí's theory of 'softness' and 'hardness', which was central to his thinking at the time.
Although fundamentally part of Dalí's Freudian phase, the imagery predicts his transition to the scientific phase, which occurred after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945.
It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself - the abstract form becoming something of a self portrait, reappearing frequently in his work.
In general the tree means life, but, in this case, it has the same function as the rest of the elements in the picture: to impress anxiety and, in a certain way, terror, although it is likely that it was conceived as a functional element on which to drape one of the watches. The golden cliffs in the upper right hand corner are reminiscent of Dalí's homeland, Catalonia, and are derived from the rocks and cliffs at Cape Creus, where the Pyrenees meet the sea.

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was painted in 1954 by Salvador Dalí, and depicts the crucified Jesus upon the net of a hypercube. Gala (Dalí's wife), is the figure in the bottom left, who stands looking up to the crucified Jesus. The scene is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat.[2][3]

On Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

The painting depicts a woman (Gala) sleeping while sunbathing naked during a calm day on rocks floating over the sea, possibly at Port Lligat.[1] [2] An elephant with incredibly long, extremely thin legs walks across the sea's horizon while carrying an obelisk. Near the woman float two drops of water and a small pomegranate.[1] From a larger pomegranate comes a fish that spews a tiger from which comes another tiger, while in front of that second tiger a bayonet points at the woman.

The bayonet, as a symbol of the stinging bee, may thus represent the woman's abrupt awakening from her otherwise peaceful dream. This is an example of Sigmund Freud's influence on surrealist art and Dali's attempts to explore the world of dreams in a dreamscape.[2]
The bee around the smaller pomegranate is repeated symbolically. The two tigers represent the body of the bee (yellow with black stripes) and the bayonet its stinger. The fish may represent the bee's eyes, because of similarity of the fish's scaly skin with the scaly complex eyes of bees.
The elephant is a distorted version of a well-known sculpture by Bernini that's located in Rome.[3] The smaller pomegranate floats between two droplets which may symbolize Venus, especially because of the heart-shaped shadow it casts.[3] It may also be used as a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection.[1] This female symbolism may contrast with the phallic symbolism of the threatening creatures.[3]

It has also been suggested that the painting is "a surrealist interpretation of the Theory of Evolution."[4]

In 1962, Dalí said his painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala." [1]

A short, alternate title for the painting is "Sting Caused by the Flight of a Bee."[2] The painting and the phenomenon of sleep paralysis inspired the Dredg album El Cielo.[5]

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954)

La desintegración de la persistencia de la memoria or The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (oil on canvas, c. 1952 to 1954), is a painting by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. It is an oil on canvas re-creation of the artist's famous 1931 work The Persistence of Memory, and measures a diminutive 25.4 × 33 cm.

In this version, the landscape from the original work has been flooded with water. Disintegration depicts what is occurring both above and below the water's surface. The landscape of Cadaqués is now hovering above the water. The plane and block from the original is now divided into brick-like shapes that float in relation to each other, with nothing binding them, the tree from which the soft watch hangs being similarly segmented. The hands of the soft watches float above their dials, with several pointed objects resembling rhinoceros horns floating in parallel formations encircling the watches. The distorted human visage from the original painting is beginning to morph into another of the strange fish floating above it. However, to Dali, the fish was a symbol of life.[citation needed]

To Dalí, this image was symbolic of the psychological effect that the advent of the atomic bomb had on humanity.[citation needed] It will be noted that the imagery of The Persistence of Memory can be read as a representation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, symbolizing the warping of time by gravity; Einstein's equations lay at the core of the science of nuclear reaction, which presumably inspired Dali to revisit this particular work.

Gogh, Vincent Willem van

Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist.^[1] His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces.

Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.

The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.

Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, August 1888 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

Vincent van Gogh. Among the Sunflowers paintings are three similar paintings with fifteen sunflowers in a vase, and two similar paintings with twelve sunflowers in a vase. Van Gogh painted the first Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, which is now in the Neue PinakothekMuseum in Munich, Germany, and the first Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, which is now in National Gallery, London, England, in August1888 when he was living in Arles southern France. The later similar paintings were painted in January the following year. The paintings are all painted on about 93 × 72 cm (37" × 28") canvases. An earlier series of four still life using sunflowers were painted in Paris in 1887.

Van Gogh began painting in late summer 1888 and continued into the following year. One went to decorate his friend Paul Gauguin'sbedroom. The paintings show sunflowers in all stages of life, from fully in bloom to withering. The paintings were innovative for their use of the yellow spectrum, partly because newly invented pigments made new colours possible. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh wrote: the sunflower is mine in a way.

On March 31, 1987, even those without interest in art were made aware of van Gogh's Sunflowers series when Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto paid the equivalent of USD $39,921,750 for Van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction atChristie's London, at the time a record-setting amount for a work of art [2] [3]. The price was over four times the previous record of about $12 million paid for Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi in 1985. The record was broken a few months later with the purchase of another Van Gogh, Irises by Alan Bond for $53.9 million at Sotheby's, New York on November 11, 1987.

While it is uncertain whether Yaso Goto bought the painting himself or on behalf of his company, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan, the painting currently resides at Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. After the purchase a controversy arose whether this is a genuine van Gogh or an Emile Schuffenecker forgery.

The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, September 1888.

Cafe Terrace at Night, also known as The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, is an oil painting executed by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh on an industrially primed canvas of size 25 (Toile de 25 figure) in Arles, France, mid September1888. The painting is not signed, but described and mentioned by the artist in his letters on various occasions -- and, as well, there is a large pen drawing of the composition which originates from the artist's estate.

The cafe terrace, now Café Van Gogh, October 2003

Still today, visitors of the site can take the place at the north eastern corner of thePlace du Forum where the artist set up his easel.^[1]. He looked south towards the artificially lighted terrace of the popular coffee house as well as into the enforced darkness of the rue leading up to the building structure far back comprising the town house (to the left, not pictured) and, beyond this structure, the tower of a former church (now Musée lapidaire). Towards the right, Van Gogh indicated a shop lighted as well, and some branches of the trees surrounding the place -- but he omitted the remainders of the roman monuments just aside this little shop.

The Starry Night, June 1889 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Van Gogh's night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village is a place of quiet order. Connecting earth and sky is the flamelike cypress, a tree traditionally associated with graveyards and mourning. But death was not ominous for van Gogh. "Looking at the stars always makes me dream," he said, "Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."

The artist wrote of his experience to his brother Theo: "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." This morning star, or Venus, may be the large white star just left of center in The Starry Night. The hamlet, on the other hand, is invented, and the church spire evokes van Gogh's native land, the Netherlands. The painting, like its daytime companion, The Olive Trees, is rooted in imagination and memory. Leaving behind the Impressionist doctrine of truth to nature in favor of restless feeling and intense color, as in this highly charged picture, van Gogh made his work a touchstone for all subsequent Expressionist painting.

L'Arlesienne: (Madame Ginoux), (1890)

Portrait of Père Tanguy,(1887)