Project 2: Artist Emulation

Van Gogh Emulation

I really enjoyed this project for many different reasons.  First of all this project helped to give me a new understanding of the challenge it takes not only to copy an artists painting, but to go further and really understand an artists style.  The ability to understand their tendencies and then to actually take that knowledge and apply it to your own work was an incredibly interesting experience for me. It really helped me to understand just how challenging painting can be especially if you do not get to fully rely on your own styles and intuitions, but instead have to think, what would your artist do.  Van Gogh was very surprising in that most of his paintings were inspired by personal events in his own life as oppose to movements in the art world.  Van Gogh focused on short strokes of color that when seen together created one object, but separately were just strokes of color. Van Gogh didn’t necessarily mix colors, but instead just put two different colors next to each other so when seen together they looked like the color Van Gogh wanted.  He did many different studies of different scenes, but I always think of him as being best know for his landscapes so that is what I decided to focus on for my final.  I really enjoyed the short lines in different parts of my final piece, because I felt it did a really good job of coming together to create the final scene and it gave it more of an interesting point to draw your eye to. This is a style that I might try and bring into my works, not for the whole piece but for different parts of it.  While I tried my best to incorporate the idea of not mixing and just putting two colors next to each other to create one color it just doesn’t fit my style.  I like to mix my colors and work to get as close to the color as I can and this style of Van Gogh’s didn’t work for me.  I still like putting different colors nest to each other I just like it better when they are a little more neutral so there is only a slight difference between the two colors. Overall this project taught me how to take another artists style create your own study in the artists style.