Featured Artwork: Two Cats After van Gogh
In 2012 I saw the exhibit "Van Gogh Up Close" and came home with a head full of ideas—and that evening sketched Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine on the landing for my first "Cats After van Gogh" sketch.
It's hard to believe it's been 13 years since I saw the exhibit “Van Gogh Up Close” and came home with a head full of ideas—and that evening sketched Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine on the landing for my first “Cats After van Gogh” sketch, a theme and style that’s stayed with me for over a dozen other sketches and created a new style for my art. Each year I celebrate the original sketch, and all the oil pastel art I’ve created since plus the many gift items I've made with this and other oil pastel sketches.
From April 12, 2012...
I looked at yesterday's little sketch at my desk and decided that if I was to truly create homage to van Gogh, I needed to have a background for these two to exist within, especially that lovely cerulean blue and turquoise van Gogh often used, and lots of little sketch lines and areas. I covered up yesterday's signature so I scraped my name into the oil pastel in the lower left as Vincent often did in his paint. Ah, this has been too much fun.
So I said when I posted this sketch April 12, 2012! I personally mark the anniversary of this sketch each year—when a piece of artwork makes that much of a difference in your life as an artist, you like to return to it to find the magic. This piece of artwork went on to win a Certificate of Excellence, a Muse Medallion and the President's Award in the 2013 Cat Writers' Association annual Communications Contest as well.
How the sketch, and the style, came to be
I traveled with that friend in April 2012 to see the “Van Gogh Up Close” exhibit in Philadelphia. Although it seems I love the Impressionists best, van Gogh is a step apart from the Impressionist styles we find most familiar in Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassatt with his stylized forms and brilliant, often non-representational colors and the heavy impasto of paint applied and layered with palette knife and brush. I'd only seen a few original van Gogh paintings, and taking in an entire exhibit to show you van Gogh’s work intended to bring the viewer near enough to touch and to see his influences filled my head with dimensional flower petals, rippling wheat textured in fields, dappled leaves seeming to move with the extra layers of paint. I closely studied the way he roughly blended colors into one another and what colors he used, the brilliant greens contrasted with the earthy sepia, lots of yellow and blue.
All the way home on the Megabus I remembered the colors and shapes and textures, and wanted to work the same energy and form I saw in his brush strokes, visualizing oil pastel to layer and blend the strokes as an experiment. Arriving home in Pittsburgh just a few hours later I saw Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine, just quietly hanging together on the landing, Giuseppe sitting upright, Sunshine loafing, and visualized exactly what I would sketch, and posted this sketch without the background on April 11.
I am channeling Vincent van Gogh tonight, trying to work the same energy and form I see in his brush strokes. I can layer with oil pastel, but can't apply or build up the thickness of medium that can be accomplished with paint; this sketch is also quite small, about 6" x 5", so I can’t work all the little strokes in as I’d like, but perhaps I’ll actually try this on canvas at some point, and something a little bigger.
Originally the sketch had only the two cats with no background as do most of my daily sketches, but I decided that if I was to truly create homage to van Gogh, I needed to have a background for these two to exist within, especially the colors and swirling style that van Gogh often used. I added the background the next day, and the final is the one you see at the top. I truly think it was the energy I brought back from that exhibit that made this an award-winning piece of artwork, and one of the most popular in my feline artwork gallery.
About this painting
I explained the process of this painting pretty well above, but I’ve also mentioned that I’ve created many other sketches in this style which I named “Cats After van Gogh.” Here’s a little gallery of some of them.
I am still refilling my inventory of gift items as I begin vendor events this year, and while I have several gift items in stock I'm still working on others. I currently have a garden flag, an individual keepsake box as well as a set of three keepsakes, a votive with this and other oil pastel sketches, a greeting card and, of course, prints.
While my websites are still offline, please ask if you are interested in prints or merchandise.
I hope you enjoy my featured artwork posts where I review one of my (usually favorite) paintings including a discussion of inspiration and place if appropriate, medium, style, preparations and creation, for those who are curious and for those who are learning.