DAUBIGNY by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

Bob Kessel’s art series “VAN GOGH” features pictures based on Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings like in the picture “DAUBIGNY” shown above. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

GARDENER by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

COTTAGES by BOb Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

FIELDS by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

NUDE by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

PARISIENS by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

WHEATFIELD by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

SHOES by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

ST PAULS by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

SUNFLOWERS by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

HERRING by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is “The Potato Eaters” (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil’s gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself “for the good of all.” During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh’s finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh’s inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

VAN GOGH’S CHAIR by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

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GAUGUIN’S CHAIR by Bob Kessel
apres Vincent van Gogh

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Bob Kessel has a new art series “Van Gogh a Go-Go” featuring pictures like “VAN GOGH’S CHAIR” and “GAUGUIN’S CHAIR” shown above. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

The two paintings of Vincent’s and Paul Gauguin’s chairs are among the most often analyzed of Van Gogh’s works.

The colour scheme of the two chairs is, to coin a phrase, as different as night and day. Van Gogh’s chair is executed with lighter colours suggesting daylight, whereas Gauguin’s chair is presented with darker, more somber tones.

The color composition of this work is based on variations around the pairs of primary complementaries–blue and orange, and red and green. These appear in their purest form only in occasional passages, to set the keynotes for the composition. Thus the area of purest red on the paving beneath the chair is balanced by touches of green above it and by a further stroke of green on the nearest chair leg. Van Gogh stresses structure through emphatic outlines, added later, that serve to contain areas of pure painting. The strength of these increases the impact of the image, but also creates a certain tension between line and color. In distorting the perspective of the floor and the chair leg, Van Gogh imposed his own personality upon the work, stressing the subjectivity of his view.

The pipe, handkerchief and tobacco give a focus to the picture in both narrative and pictoral terms, providing a note of neutral white at the center of the interplay of cool and warm hues. The use of blue to outline the parts of the chair increases the sense of cool draftsmanship restraining the sensuous handling of the painting.

The floor tiles are painted with the waving brushstrokes that Van Gogh often used in the backgrounds of his work at this time. Short horizontal and vertical strokes alternate in a loose mesh of reds, browns and greens. The thickness of the paint used is revealed by the heavy smear from the side of the brush that is left alongside each stroke.

VAN GOGH’S CHAIR by Vincent Van Gogh

GAUGUIN’S CHAIR by Vincent Van Gogh

FISH RED STUDIO by Bob Kessel

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Bob Kessel has created an art series based on Henri Matisse. The pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, “In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most.” By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes — which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves — Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life.

Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover “the essential character of things” and to produce an art “of balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.

In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity  in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity .

When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d’Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse’s most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. “A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public” was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves’ color “sticks of dynamite.” The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse.

Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.

Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cezanne.

Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal.

There are many movies about artists out there, Bob Kessel recommends these. Some are obscure but all are worth watching. Many of the artists in these movies are included in the Artists on Art series by Bob Kessel. Portraits of famous artists drawn in the style of the artist depicted. Each picture has a quote by that artist. Many will be surprised by the not so well known quotes.

The Horse’s Mouth
(1958) Director: Ronald Neame
Alec Guinness is Gulley Jimson. He is broke, difficult, conniving, uncouth, and a welcher – but an artist. The visions in his head may not really satisfy him when realized, but the quest continues, for the perfect wall. The Beeders leave for six weeks of vacation and return to find a 7000 pound committment and the wall of their living room a national treasure, even though living with a wall mural of feet is not their cup of tea. Then – in a bombed out church scheduled for demolition – THE wall that can become his vision.

La Belle Noiseuse
by Jacques Rivette 1991 run time 236 minutes
French film. the uncut 4 hour version is a must see.
Where most films don’t show the artwork the artist makes, this movie has the camera linger on the artwork as it is created. Although not about a recognizable famous artist, it captures the alchemy of an artist and his model better than any other movie.

Adventures of Picasso
(original title: Picassos äventyr) is a 1978 Swedish film comedy directed by Tage Danielsson, starring Gösta Ekman, as the famous painter. A Monty Pythonesque crazy, laugh out loud slapstick comedy.

Wolf at the Door
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Max von Sydow Director: Henning Carlsen
Donald Sutherland plays an excellent Gaugin. He takes you through his life from deserting his family in Denmark through his time in Paris with all the other artists of his day to his travels in Tahiti. Always kept your attention. Highly recommend movie for it’s content and for the history value.

Edvard Munch
(1976) Starring: Geir Westby, Gro Fraas Director: Peter Watkins
Famously described by Ingmar Bergman as a “work of genius”, Peter Watkins’ multi-faceted masterpiece is more than just a bio-pic of the iconic Norwegian Expressionist painter. Focusing initially on Munch’s formative years in late 19th Century Kristiania (now Oslo), Watkins uses his trademark style to create a vivid picture of the emotional, political and social upheavals that would have such an effect on his art.
The young artist (Geir Westby) has an affair with “Mrs Heiberg” (Gro Fraas), a devastating experience that will haunt him for the rest of his life, and his work is viciously attacked by the critics and public alike. He is forced to leave his home country for Berlin, where, along with the notorious Swedish playwright August Strindberg, he becomes part of the cultural storm that is to sweep Europe.

Lust For Life
1956 Dir Vincente Minnelli
I like this mostly for the over the top comic performances.
Kirk Douglas gives an Oscar-nominated performance in Vincente Minelli’s adaptation of Irving Stone’s torrid life of Vincent van Gogh. It perpetuates the romantic myth of the tortured artist (some of the best are very well-adjusted, you know!) but is an enjoyable, if not entirely accurate, portrait of a great artist.

Van Gogh
(1992) Starring: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London Director: Maurice Pialat
Jacques Dutronc is simply extraordinary as Vincent, his acting filled with subtlety. He doesn’t stoop to histrionics or scenery-chewing…he doesn’t need to. Every gesture, every facial expression, every look in his eyes says something about the character. No wonder he won a Cesar for the role. This is neither the Vincent of “Lust for Life” (Kirk Douglas’ tormented soul searching for love and understanding) nor the Vincent of “Vincent and Theo” (Tim Roth’s mad-as-a-hatter egoist). This Vincent has a quiet cup of coffee before he goes to work in the morning and escapes Dr. Gachet’s house to enjoy a solitary lunch in the wheatfields (the latter is one of my favorite moments of the film–simple but lyrical). There’s no sign of the “mad artist” of the van Gogh mythology. The suicide comes as much a surprise in the film as it must have in real life. We don’t see it coming.

Moulin Rouge
(1952) Starring: José Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor Director: John Huston
Nominated for seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and winner of two, this visually stunning biography of master artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is a “painting come to life” (Time)! “Flawlessly directed” (The Hollywood Reporter) by John Huston (The African Queen), from a script by Anthony Veiller and Huston, Moulin Rouge is simply “irresistible” (Newsweek)! As a dwarf, Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) believes he’s too ugly to ever fall in love. So he loses himself in painting and cognac. A fixture at Paris’ infamous turn-of-the-century Moulin Rouge nightclub, Lautrec meets a girl from the street who then breaks his heart. Luckily, newfound artistic success, copious amounts of drink and friendship with a new woman keep him alive. Will he be able to mend his broken heart in time to recognize the true love now staring him inthe face?