All of his paintings depict buildings and tranquil scenery. And the supposed greatest thing about his paintings is that in different intensity of lightings, the setting of the paintings seemed to changed. For instant, in bright light, one of the paintings seemed to show a busy town early in the morning. When the light is slightly dimmed, the sky seemed to turn slightly reddish and the clouds seemed to bathed in gold. Pretty nice trick, but to me, that's all it is. A nice gimmick.
I'm not saying that his paintings are bad. Quite the contrary. All his paintings are painted beautifully... yet they all seemed hollow. In my opinion, his paintings seemed to lack... how do I put it... an essense. It's as if as beautiful as his paintings are, they look... still. Lifeless. Which is why I find them so uninteresting. Also, the extent of how commercialized his paintings are sort of make me think lowly of his arts.
But as we're leaving the place (oddly, all my friends seemed to really enjoy his paintings), there's this one painting that caught my attention. It's a portrait of a few flowers in a vase, and to me, that's the best painting I've seen in the entire gallery. It kinda reminded me of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.
It was then when I started to reflect about why I like Vincent van Gogh's art so much. The first painting of his that drew my attention was Cafe Terrace at Night (1888). There's a painting (reproduced, of cuz) of it hanged in a certain bakery shop, Corner's Bakery, at Bandar Baru Klang. I remembered (fondly, I must admit) of how I go there to buy some bread and ended up examining the painting, totally absorbed in my fascination of it. Heck, I even considered going to the bakery often juz to look at the picture!
OK, let me be frank, I'm no artist. I can't write a very good review of how good the painting it etc. But wat really striked me in this particular painting is how alive it looks. The starry sky, the glow from the cafe illuminates the all the tables and chairs outside, people eating there, a carriage moving towards you... There's this sense of life in the painting. The golden light that shines so brightly in the starry night, and people moving about their lives... I dunno how to described the wonder I felt when I 1st seen this painting. And then there's the strange but interesting broad strokes that has become so characteristic of Vincent's art... That is when I got interested to find out more about the artist who paints this.
Since then, I've learned much about him, how he got influenced by Impressionism, and he have a great interest in Japanese art, and how he went mad in the last years of his life, and eventually killed himself. I've seen many of his paintings (again, reproduced ones... Sigh...), including the famous Starry Night (which inspired the song Vincent), but I still held Cafe Terrace at Night
as my fav painting from him, and also my fav painting of all.
Hmmm... I'm supposed to write an entry about Thomas Kinkade, and I ended up writing about Vincent van Gogh pula... Oh well, sufficient to say, I love art bcuz of its essence, not bcuz of its effects. I guess that's y I'm so attracted to abstract and impressionist paintings.
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