Vincent van Gogh and Cuno Amiet

This week, we had to find an artist (or artists) and research why that artist made the art that he or she made. Then, we had to create a piece of art to accompany how the artist made their work, but do it in our own way. That is, do it in a way pleasing to ourselves, not the artist who would have made it. I chose to do a combination of van Gogh and Cuno Amiet. Here is a very brief description of my PowerPoint presentation on the two artists: Vincent van Gogh was unsatisfied with academic art and created many paintings that portrayed realism, but not shown realistically. Instead, he emphasized realism with his color choice. Also, he used color to portray his own mood and emotions about things. Then, I transitioned to Cuno Amiet, a Swiss Expressionist painter. He was inspired by some of van Gogh's and Gauguin's work when he attended the Pont-Aven school in France. Amiet was inspired by their use of color. Thus, he got very excited about color and learned to use it freely and for his own happiness.

Naturally, I decided to do a painting for my accompanying art work. I painted my maternal grandparents. I used more naturalistic faces and everything else had broad, not naturalistic strokes. I wanted to emphasize realistic faces because 1) I prefer naturalistic painting of people because I love the painterly quality of something that is shown to be realistic and 2) I wanted to emphasize the importance of their face imagery by not having them be made of blurred strokes of any sort. Then I used colors that I like and that show my own mood/emotions towards them. I used pink for my grandmother's shirt because she has breast cancer, yet she is beautiful and vividly bright in life. My grandfather has a green shirt because I think of him as a pretty tranquil man and it went with the mood of the garden scene I set for them. This garden scene is a memory of them in my grandmother's garden at our dacha (Russian summer home) in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The surrounding color is a bright yellow, which I think of a happy, sunny summer day-- like the many I enjoyed during my visits there over the years. Then it sort of fades out to a darker shade of yellow to show that they are distant to me.