Arguing Color Hues with Van Gogh

It started as a simple exercise, a cure for writer’s block, copy a Van Gogh. Practice discipline in painting, work on mixing complex colors, capture vintage tones, and learn from the best. But, it is now late afternoon, the natural light is starting to fade and I,well, I am arguing with Van Gogh. “Why Vincent? Why? What color is it?”

It never is just ‘green’ or ‘blue’ with Van Gogh. Its more colors than one could possibly imagine, more hues than those contained within the range of my modern palette, more subtle variation of tone than my amateur skills are capable of; more madness than I care to explore. Oh Vincent…

Photo by Jim Chou

His lines are simple, his subjects relatable, and despite his over popularity with the makers of screen savers and dorm room posters, Van Gogh had something I believe no other artist has ever managed to replicate for me: an internal color palette that is uniquely his, wonderful and frustrating.

The beginning of madness
After transferring the basics of Van Gogh’s “the Bedroom” to a prepped canvas, using grid lines and a cheap pencil, I was ready to copy the master. Deciding to start with what seemed easiest, the back wall of the bedroom, I glance at the prep resting in the spare easel to get an idea of the color.

Photo by Jason Coleman

The back wall was ‘blue’. Another glance. The back wall was a greenish blue. Another glance. The back wall was a greenish, grayish yellowish ‘blue’. I began mixing my paints.

I squirt thick oils in a half circle around the edge of the palette: a little titanium white for mixing, ultramarine, Payne’s gray, cadmium yellow, sap green just in case, and just a dab of black for darkening. Pouring a little medium from the large bottle on the desk, I grab a paintbrush and begin to blend. And almost instantly the madness begins.

The Descent
I can’t quite get the color of the wall right. I hold the paintbrush tip close to the print, discover my mistake, and start again. And again. And again. I do this about twenty times until I realize my palette is covered in thick piles of the wrong shade. I begin to question Van Gogh’s motives, consider him malicious and sneaky, out to thwart me. Yet determined, I descend into a paint-blending maelstrom…

Photo by Doozle

Mixing, mixing, mixing, checking the hue by holding the now dripping palette against the print, no that’s not it, no that’s not right, again, again, perhaps a little lemon yellow? What about mixing the blue and white separately? Checking, checking, not right, still not there yet… I know I know what about adding a little flesh tone? Yes! Its changing, its closer, it’s almost…no! That’s not it. Not right, start again. Mixing, mixing, and more mixing.

Communing with the dead
I begin to verbalize my frustration, communing with the spirit of the French painter, increasingly pleading with him for direction. Whatever combination of blues, greens, and yellows I tried, nothing was ever quite right. I went online and flipped through art history books in attempt to find a close up of the blue, a hint of what colors I should be mixing. Back to the easel now I run, convinced of a pinkish gray undertone to the wall, a building up of layers of colors. Spare palette out, mixing, checking, convincing myself, certain that this time it was right, I made the first brush stroke on the canvas, stepped back to compare the ‘blue’ with the print.

Photo by factoid

Aaaarrrggh!!!!!!!!

The paintbrush flew in a fiery rage from my now cramped and highly frustrated hand, hit the wall, and landed with a quiet uselessness upon the floor. A moment later, my husband returned to find me sitting on the floor covered in a bluish, greenish, whitish pinkish grayish spray of frustrated creativity glaring demoniacally at the print in the easel.

“Hey honey…erm…what are you doing?” Unable to turn away from my nemesis, the now sinister back wall of the great artist’s bedroom, that traitor to all that was simple and easy, all that was obvious and certain, and through gritted teeth, I barely manage to reply, “I’m arguing with Van Gogh.”

Wishing for a time machine
So perhaps the exercise was too ambitious for a part-time dabbler like me; the often-unnoted brilliance in the work of the master oil painter, something far far beyond my scope. I’ll accept that. But it doesn’t dampen my curiosity as to the actual mix of paint that created the blue of the walls in the famous piece. Or gave the bed its deep heavy yet simultaneously bright cast, or made the wood floors a rainbow of verdant greens, subtle clay grays and melancholic browns.

But sometimes, just sometimes, it seems a futile curiosity. Because I can’t go back in time, cannot return to early September of 1889 to a small artists studio in the rural backwaters of France and knock on the door, wait for it to open, and ask the beleaguered looking fair haired gentleman who answers:

“Seriously Vincent…what’s in this blue?”
 
 
Title Photo by Album de Celine