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- Painting webinar: TOURNESOLS
Painting webinar: TOURNESOLS
LIVE on Friday, August 21 2020, 11 am Pacific. Register to watch anytime thereafter.
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Watch the inspiration video here: https://youtu.be/-a_Z2t6cIiU
After purchase, we will send you access link to the webinar (before session starts) or recorded links if you purchase thereafter. We'll also send you the link to the shared photo folder specific for this webinar.
We're using ZOOM as video platform. Video and audio for participants will be muted by default during the live webinar. You'll be able to view and listen presentation, and interact via chat. Session will be recorded and up for replay anytime after live webinar ends.
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TOURNESOLS
Last week, after learning of the endearing reasons Van Gogh decided to make so many portraits of the postman of Arles and his family (sense of isolation, inability to rent models for sittings, correspondence with Theo), we decided to dig in a bit further into that chapter of his life.
Before moving to Arles, Vincent started painting sunflowers while he temporarily moved to Paris, thinking commercial success would follow. The city ended up feeling too foreign for him, and he found solace and refuge in the rustic botanical subject. The flowers represented the roughness and agrarian ethos of the real countryside, which he now missed.
Besides, he loved the vibrancy of the color and also the form. Poet and critic Albert Aurier referred to the subject as Van Gogh's vegetable sun. Vincent had an evident passion for setting light ablaze in his paintings through suns, stars, or swirly skies, using tons of yellow and orange paint framed with blues to make them even more combusting. Sunflowers were the perfect terrestrial stars.
But it wasn't only melancholy or form/color that attracted him to paint the flowers. Writing to one of his three sisters in 1890, Van Gogh describes his sunflowers as an "almost a cry of anguish while symbolizing gratitude." The Vegetable Sun brought him comfort and familiarity in troubled times.
Anguish and gratitude. I think that's pretty much where we are right about now. Let this vegetable sun shed some light.
• Painting premise: still life with sunflowers.
• Props: sunflowers or an image of them.
• Painting surface: any size, any kind. We recommend 9x12 or under.
• Painting webinar medium: oil over cotton paper. Feel free to select your media.