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Vincent van Gogh: Style and Technique

 Vincent van Gogh, often famed for his bold and dramatic brush strokes which expressed emotion and added a feeling of movement to his works, focused largely on oil based-post impressionist, paintings. He was a unique artist who worked with a sense of urgency and in the 70 days leading up to his death, he averaged one painting per day.

Largely self-taught, van Gogh started his career copying prints and reading 19th century drawing manuals and books. His technique came from the belief that to be a great painter you had to master drawing first. It was only when he was satisfied with his drawing techniques that he started adding in colors and this bold palette became one of the most recognizable features of his later work. 

In his early career, van Gogh painted with dark and melancholy colors, however, his styles changed immensely when he moved to Paris in 1886. He began using a lighter palette of reds, yellows, oranges, greens and blues, and experimented with the broken brush strokes of the Impressionists. He also attempted the pointillist technique of the Neo-Impressionists whereby contrasting dots of pure color are optically mixed into the resulting color by the viewer. He was also influenced by Japanese prints and he painted dark outlines around objects, filling these in with areas of thick colors.  

  

In 1888 van Gogh started to imitate Gaugin's technique of painting with memory during this time which resulted in his painting becoming more attractive and less realistic. Van Gogh's emerging styles saw him emotionally reacting to subjects through his use of color and brush work. He deliberately used colors to capture mood, rather than using colors realistically. No other artist was doing so at this time. Van Gogh said, "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully."

   

Vincent van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits between the years 1886 and 1889, reflecting his ongoing pursuit of complementary color contrasts and bolder composition. This collection places him among the most productive self-portraitists of all time. Van Gogh portrait painting as a method of introspecting and developing his artistic skills.

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