Painting van Gogh's Cypresses with Emmy Award wining David Dunlop

coming up next on landscapes through time artist david dunlop travels to the south of france to explore the art and inspiration of vincent van gogh in 1889 how does one lonely and crazed dutchman vincent van gogh foresee the future of art in 1889 he signs himself in here a mental institution saint paul de masol just outside san rami de provence in southern france he's come here for calm for serenity a troubled man and yet he's able to foresee the future of art to build a new avenue for art expressionism and to bury impressionism van gogh has a manic streak that he's able to put into his painting here and it's here 150 paintings it's his penultimate year of life i'm david dunlop i'm a landscape painter and i'm here with a few of my students and we're going to set our easels up where he set his easels up and we're going to try to discover the secrets of vincent van gogh to follow his torturous and difficult and yet rapturous experience on the grounds surrounding saint paul de masol here at saint paul vincent is far from his beginning in holland in 1853 son of a distant and strict protestant minister he's closest to his younger brother theo who will financially support him throughout his art career after he's fired as a missionary in 1880 he transfers his religious dollar tree his ferocious passion to painting he explores the dutch dark palette the palette of rembrandt this passion brings him to paris in 1886 after the impressionists revolutionized the conservative art world in the 70s there he meets the young neo impressionist toulouse latrek gauguin senior bernard his palette becomes more intense and colorful his brush strokes freer and more broken and he experiments with flattened planes outline forms from those japanese wood blocks he loves vincent leaves paris in exhaustion after two years for the heat and serenity of provence he's been a dedicated painter for only nine years when he arrives at the asylum this is vincent's room he suffered here but he found comfort here this was a haven for him he writes to his brother theo from here sitting at the desk behind me he says theo i'm in a good place sister epiphany dr peyron who are here understand him understand his needs to paint and understand his suffering it's here he has the epiphany that what he suffers from is a disease it's not some flaw in his character but it's disease it's out of this window that he sees a landscape that brings him back to his flemish roots the wheat field the lavender they're still here the spirit of vincent is still in this room these are the grounds that vincent walks it's here that he discovers the bugs the flowers and he finds himself enlivened enriched it's here that he's allowed by dr peyron to wander if he's feeling all right on these walks here on these paths and down on the road to san remi he finds the subjects he finds the cypresses he finds the irises he finds the olive groves he has four terrible episodes as they're called here where he's disabled in that year that leaves him with just a few months to make all of those great paintings now coming here i'm trying to find the spirit of van gogh he says i don't want a copy of nature i don't want to come out here and paint an olive tree and a cypress tree i want the inner feeling i want something that expresses my soul he tells theo in a letter i know these colors are hot too hot maybe but as he says i'm making souvenirs for the future i know that i'm not appreciated now but i believe i will be he had a prescient sense for the future because what he was doing was rational was coherent was ambitious and was connected to the history of art he fails it so much in his life he fails at being a missionary he fails at being an art dealer he fails at a love relationship he fails at friendships his temperament drives him to explosive fits and of course that's alienating he has a lot of pathologies today the speculation is that he was probably bipolar that he was manic depressive that he may have had syphilis he definitely had epilepsy and he tried to suppress these horrible episodes of hallucination and hearing voices by drinking absinthe which probably made things worse because it's an hallucinatory all by itself but he had those moments of brilliance and he had the reverence for rembrandt this is a rembrandt drawing early those dutch and german painters experiment with drawing and watercolor making little pictures no bigger than this picture and the cross-hatching expressive gestures that's the tradition that van gogh is going to take and this is a view out van gogh's window from his small cell his barred window he had this view of the wheat field he found the identification with perspectival space see how we go back into space linear perspective bigger to smaller all going back to a vanishing point along a sight line this was not a naive artist vincent was well versed in the traditions here's a van rice dale same 17th century dutch painting look at these clouds these are clouds that are concocted in the studio then ricedale wants to design a shape to take you back sweeping curving motions dramatic clouds all constructed to give you a dramatic feeling so when he goes to do starry night or a painting like this in the metropolitan museum the cypress the olive trees the roiling skies he's borrowing from the rolling skies of his flemish forebears this is not complete invention this is a continuum it's a continuum that's animated with more expressive gesture a freer brighter palette i'm looking at a big thunderhead over here and i can hear the thunder sort of drama that i expect from van gogh he knows we're visiting i'm going to put up some colors that he would have put up i know that he used raw sienna i need something dark i can use a burnt umber a brilliant cobalt blue vermilion red white and an emerald green a cadmium yellow synthetic ultramarine blue that was available to him too at this point now let me sketch some of this in to design this painting he's going to think about the standards for movement asymmetry a flawed symmetry over here on my left i've got a stand of cypress trees and i'll just mask them together and bring them out only as far as this not to the middle there's a path that moves back down through here that's a way to guide you into the painting and the shadows rolling and falling and coming up the mountains those blue distant mountains the soft shape over here take a landscape down i can either take it down here or down here he would have thought about where he could put it to elevate the sense of theater his own inner throb and then a rolling sky and i'll lay in some of those heavy darks are my choices the burnt umber that's nice and dark if i go to ultramarine blue it'll be dark and rich he's creating a topography a surface as though the land itself had a surface structure everything has a volume so i can create these trees with cylindrical volumes but the cylinders move they dance they're not static cylinders this is not an art based on simple observation this is an art based on a transmutation of feeling using the landscape as a springboard everything now has more motion and he's going to take that idea of undulation and a serpentine movement and apply it to his verticals as well as his horizontals the softer rounder form over here the mountains streaming across the back in the distance it's blue gray way off here the idea of immeasurable space i can use a yellow against this blue one of his favorite compliments were you yellows and orange against blues the new neo impressionists take the idea of complementary and successive contrast and decide to use that contrast in an exaggerated way to amplify their feelings about nature and life these artists study chevrole's principles of color harmony like simultaneous contrast what i place two opposite colors on the color wheel right next to one another it's right where they meet on that edge they're particularly strong even vibrating these color phenomena happen inside the eye and brain they're not happening out in nature he uses shadows that are filled with color van gogh and even earlier impressionists try to use pure color straight from the tube van gogh's choice of brilliant color these colors have a symbolic meaning to you the brush strokes are echoing the drawing strokes to build a structure a form a landscape see how they run back just like the meadow of wheat that so inspired him he has a tradition of forward to backward with color these yellows advance yellow falls out in the distance it's a da vinci-esque idea for color recession in the distance we see blue when vincent was confined to the asylum he painted the hallways and he follows a tradition of copying the masters milay rembrandt de lacroix you can see this in his repainting of delacroix's pieta in one of his fits unknowingly he would eat paint and occasionally drink turpentine well that doesn't help anyone he builds a texture by cross hatching just as i'm doing right now twist and turn and get them to to move and wiggle now i'm just giving myself some rolling sky up here see that rolling put a little more blue and really roll really roll this is that vermilion that he likes he's leaving open bits of canvas monet's doing the same thing he's taking ideas from the impressionist leaders and he pushes them a little further when you paint like van gogh use a lot of pressure and a lot of motion and your ease my easel isn't used to all that dancing come back to papa sweetie new impressionists like van gogh leave the studio to study art in the cafes to study and advance their understanding of color and theory and painting these conversations are not just about socializing in women and politics they are seriously about art and how to achieve what they are after with color with paint who does this take a lot of paint this is where the unconscious writing this is the source of that expressionism that's going to happen in the 1950s 60 years after van gogh paints here the repercussions of painting from the subconscious and a liberated subconscious personal deep inner feeling with strong gesture that's the legacy of vengo right now look at those trees you see the tops are catching the light a little darker underneath we just get the feeling we're not trying to transcribe just get the feeling it's a little brighter back in here to move it back even further there's an intellectual history to painting in the west that reaches back to plato and it's the idea of harmony with nature of trying to find cosmological harmonies that are embedded in nature eternal truths and the evidence of eternal truths are found in eternal forms circles cones spheres cezanne talks about this socrates talks about it and van gogh is a part of this tradition vincent dares me to use strong color oh a little bit higher contrast he kept writing to theo more paint more paint and he would tell them how he was doing and he would send him sketches through the mail this idea of using exaggerated color came from a relationship he had with paul gauguin just months earlier he had been sharing a studio in arle with gauguin it had been his ambition and hope that they could start an art colony down there but these were two tempestuous strong-willed artists a wild fight vincent throws his drink at gogan in the cafe the next day the charges are that vincent cut a major part of an earlobe off and delivers it in a package to a prostitute rachel there's another version that vincent so wanted golgan to stay it was gauguin who cut off the ear in a fight that night and vincent not wanting to see his friend prosecuted claimed that he's mutilated himself now the paint just creams and splashes with other colors just they carry up extra colors with them as they go i don't want any stroke to be static i want them all to be animated see how we twist and turn and get them to to move and wiggle there's a passionate difference between gogan and van gogh the difference in the definition of art and for van gogh it is connected to observation and for golga it's connected to abstracting from observation it would be from here after 53 weeks that he moves to ovary and he meets dr gache he thought he was getting stable getting better and he wanted to meet his brother's wife and his son vincent he found a brief period of success finally his first positive reviews they spoke of promise for this kind of work but in these last months at o'vert depression returns and in july 1890 age 37 van gogh shoots himself in the chest he lingers for a few days with his brother theo beside him then dies a few short months after that his brother theo dies they're buried alongside one another at o'vert without theo and vincent it falls to johanna theo's wife to protect and promote vincent's art there was so much energy in those marks i can candidly tell you i'm not used to painting like van gogh and that this is quite an experiment for me i'm beginning to get something of the feeling of his texture here but as i'm racing with the storm and whoa is that storm getting close i don't know how much tempting a fate i can do i'm afraid i'm going to have to just take the tape off vincent this is as much as i could get done before the storm hits [Music] think on this meditation with vincent that i am not out to copy nature that i am out to integrate myself and my feelings with nature this is a landscape of personal revelation of kinship with the energies and the vibrations of nature this was the springboard for expressionism and a new century of art i want to see how my students are doing a couple of them before the downpour [Music] i'm lisa love and i'm a landscape painter that's good artist you know how famous this olive grove is don't you lisa i do nancy i sure do yeah because our pal vincent van gogh stood right where you're standing and right where you were standing when you painted this picture and those mountains back there those are his mountains and they kind of track don't they the olive trees and from the back there's a certain light back here that's what i'd work on with you as i'd say let's get the olive trees to jump and snap because he uses contrast a little more than you're using it but i like this design you've united the olive trees all together so they're not some individual soldiers that we feel a natural flow there's nice character here thank you that's emotion so i'm going to just start by suggesting a little more light here see what happens and i'm going to use some of the rhythms of van gogh okay i would love that now because you're in acrylic it's often better to use a little medium so i'm going to pull a little medium here since we're in acrylic not oil so you're going to use the light color to pop it out yeah to put sort of a halo around it yeah and i'm going to try to get something irregular out of that rock do you see how that snaps the trees forward it's just a contrast in value now they're green he liked to work with compliments that was the science of the day he was aware of what color compliments could do you're going to put some red in there yeah because this is green hey he had they're good and they were color compliments he liked it's partly because he'd been painting with gauguin earlier and they talked about using the color complements and he'd been in paris and he met with seniac and some of those pointless painters in fact seniac is the only artist i know that came down here to visit him when he was in his troubles oh really yeah it says nice thing about scenic doesn't it yeah the band didn't come gogan came when he was down in oral just below here okay oh we've got a friend now this is with a little more pink and coral in it going right over it and you see how thick i'm using the paint to get a motion i'm just using the strokes in an expressive way and you're using a lot more paint than i did a lot of paint but that really snaps these trees forward doesn't it now this these distant mountains they don't have to be that dark howdy friend painters come in all shapes and forms i had ants all over here today maybe that was a reincarnation i'm just making this a little more violet okay don't want it to be too light because i still want it to have contrast i want the mountains to be lighter in the distance okay because they'll go back now do you see how the mountains are back behind the trees so the trees to the mountains he understood perspectival theory in terms of color okay [Applause] we could still have some fun with some of those blues you know what the french call in here van gogh and flemish governor see we're getting that tumult of sky [Music] rhythms i'm making a coral color and what's this for the back right in here and that look how bright that is it's really going to scream forward maybe too much he said let me put too much down and he got that from his friend gaga if there was a yellow put a stronger yellow than the yellow what was there and that was the pon evol school of art now you see how we see through the trees they're silhouetted against this meadow now the foreground here every stroke is the same and it's either here here or here right toward it yeah so he wouldn't have done that well he's going to do some interesting rhythms patterns and rhythms he did swirls and in the grasses we could swirl the grass right in like that and we'll overlap the trees he does lots of interesting interweaving patterns moving back and that helps give it perspective yes it helps give it a perspective at the same time he sometimes plowed he sometimes he could push he could drag he could pull he could roll he had a pretty good vocabulary of marks and remember the marks would get bigger as he gets down up front he didn't always use the right color in the right place well no no he used what is called expressive color that is color that isn't a transcription of the landscape but is something that comes from within so for example as i'm doing this let's use some expressive color a little more orange right a little yellow coral like this that's not there we will just mix it in with this to give it an energy against the the green and we'll put a pattern of this in and he could do the same thing for these leaves he could feel the shape he feels the shape and sculpts he sculpts the tree so let's sculpt the tree we had a really hard time with the trees with the shape of the leaves see how i'm building a volume here okay and putting that blue green of the olive trees that gray blue green in this is so much fun i am so convinced that had these artists had access to acrylics they would have been acrylic painters you think so oh he and the impressionists all the they had to wait for this paint to dry before they could put more layers on without it getting mixed and polluted dries fast and that's the beauty of acrylic we can get an opaque you can glaze with it but he's an opaque painter and you see how they're getting volume by the direction of the stroke now watch this lighter value is going to move this part of the tree right toward you see how that part just started to move toward you light expands and light advances and that's all i'm doing it's fun isn't it it's great this is a place to paint i mean do you feel a vibration here what do you feel nancy it's vibrations i think that this has been out most entertaining collaboration between you and me and vincent and vincent van gaal i love what you did that such an unhappy life could give us so much pleasure color intensity of feeling vibrancy his yellows are more yellow his violet's more violet when the cypress trees swayed they swayed more violently when he painted the edges of a mountain range against the sky it wasn't just an edge it was a roller coaster expression and feeling drove vincent and that would drive the future of art i'm david dunlop i'm a landscape painter [Music] for more information about landscapes through time with david dunlop please visit daviddunlop.com [Music] on the next landscapes through time artist david dunlop travels to monet's fabled water lily garden in giverny [Music] you

Channel: David Dunlop

Views: 1,565

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

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Id: G-SkQFYtz_s

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021