Vincent Van Gogh's Notebooks

I'm updating websites at the moment while playing an old BBC programme about Vincent van Gogh's Notebooks on my Mini iPad which sits just in front of my iMac.

Do play it - it's excellent!

It's the equivalent of listening to a good Radio 4 programme while including black and white photography of his drawings and paintings. I find I don't miss the colour as I know most of the images used so well.

This documentary, made for the BBC's schools and colleges strand, follows Van Gogh's story from his early studies until his death. The programme details the hardship that the artist witnessed and endured throughout his life. (1964)

I hadn't realised the influence of his Japanese woodcuts on changing his style from the strong, sombre, stylised drawings to a more refined and lighter drawings and then paintings which included colour.  Or the impact that trying to draw light had on his own scope for mark-making.

He tried to draw light and even colour and created a new set of notation marks

Starry Night (Saint-Rémy, June 1889)
Medium drawing, pen and Indian ink on paper; 47 × 62.5 cm (18.5 × 24.6 in)
(Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow)

The programme is a great mix of intelligent selection of quotations, film of places he visited and painted and a narrative which covers both biographical history and the changes in his artistic practice.

View of Arles, flowering orchards (April 1889)
(Flowering Orchards - a Van Gogh series)
oil on canvas, 72 × 92 cm (28.3 × 36.2 in)

I made a study of Van Gogh and particularly of his drawings back in February 2007 - and, as a result have written about him on and off ever since!

Below is a list of my blog posts about Vincent Van Gogh - and the website I created at the same time.

• Introduction to the Van Gogh Project
• The economic impact of Van Gogh's Drawings
• Van Gogh: More About Drawing
• Van Gogh: Drawing Landscapes
• Van Gogh, colour and a colour study
• The Van Gogh Project: the artists' contributions #2
• Van Gogh: Drawing media and techniques
• Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings (Taschen)
• Van Gogh and John Updike - a review
• Flowers in Art - and Van Gogh #1
• Flowers in Art: Van Gogh #2 - Sunflowers and the value of repetition
• Gardens in Art: Drawings and Paintings by Van Gogh
• Van Gogh: Drawing Figures, Portraits and Self-Portraits
• The Visual Translation of Japan in Late 19th-Century Paris
• Hokusai, Van Gogh and the iris paintings
• Video: Vincent van Gogh at the Musée d'Orsay
• A map of Van Gogh's London
• The Real Van Gogh at the Royal Academy
• The Real Van Gogh - Portraits
• Van Gogh and the Yellow House in ArlesThe Real Van Gogh - Orchards and Blossom

and my website

• About Vincent Van Gogh - Famous Painter