I posted on Van Gogh's Sunflowers on March 12, you can chase it here if you want. I am now starting a near scale version in tapestry which is both a piece of unhumble cheek and an act of devotion to Van Gogh. I know perfectly well that any attempt to portray, construe, replicate a masterpiece is doomed to failure, and seems an act futile and foolish.
But. And there are several buts. First, I am not seeking to replicate but to contemplate. The scaled drawing on canvas, the choice of coloured thread, the slow building up of stitches, the immersion in the images and colours, the combination of freehand stitching and the constraint of Van Gogh's shapes and colours, all combine in a disposition of attentiveness.
So, second, I know that multi-tasking is the thing, do more than one thing at a time, even do three at a time and each of them well - that's the ideal, I know. But not with tapestry. I can listen to music, but can't watch televison while doing this. So far from showing any disrespect or trivialising these glorious* paintings by trying to copy one of them, I am taking time and trouble to follow the artists hand and eye.
Third, if you look at the previous post you will see that Van Gogh painted Sunflowers to show forth gratitude and hopefulness. They are studies in yellow, because that is the colour that radiates from the sun, the centre of all life and the source for Van Gogh of all positive hopefulness and thankfulness. The miracle is that Van Gogh painted such dazzling exuberance while struggling with inner turmoils that would eventually close in on him in a self-destructive cycle of despair. Add to this recent research that shows Van Gogh used compounds in his paint that means some of the most vivid and brilliant yellows have turned brown with age and, irony of ironies, by exposure to sunlight.
So my tapestry is not an attempted replica of the painting in the National Gallery. It will be an impression of an Impressionist; the vivid yellows and contrasting brilliances of colours which are a study in yellow, I'll show in brightest stranded cotton. I'm not trying to reproduce Van Gogh's painting; I'm trying to capture in colour his courage, his vision of hopefulness, his immense humanity and passion for life, the tenderness and intensity with which he looked on created things and saw to the essence of existence, and believed at the centre of all things goodness could be found.
It's one of the neglected facts about Van Gogh that he was a man of intense Christian faith earlier in his life and career. He moved away from Evangelicalism of a Reformed style to a much less personal form of theism. His loss of religious faith, or at least his move away from certainty and dogmatic convictions, was never a loss of belief in life itself. Whatever else the Sunflower sequence of paintings express, they affirm for Van Gogh the reality of light, the vitality of life, the vibrancy of colour and the radiance of existence - and it is to his credit as a courageous human being, that such affirmation was possible only by the most costly and creative defiance of which he was capable - to paint the opposite of what he felt inside.
So his Sunflowers make real and vivid the human life that is the alternative to death; they announce the hopefulness that argues against despair; they radiate the riotous energy that gives the lie to the lethargy and ennui of his depression, and yet those same flowers caught in a still life, celebrating beauty captured and released in its living essence, contrasts with the inner agitation and mania of a man whose emotional life burned with consuming passion. To read Vincent's letters about these flowers, and sense the joy he took in painting them, is to begin, only begin, to understand the vision that saw within the anatomy of this perfectly named flower of the sun, realities that he might never grasp fully, but which he sensed were sufficient to grasp him, and perhaps save him. Van Gogh's Sunflowers are above all else a spiritual, personal and deeply existential statement, hope made defiant by magnificent art which construes the world as a place where the sun shines on the righteous, and the unrighteous.
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