Day with Vincent

Vincent Van Gogh has been one of my favorite artists ever since I discovered his work in junior high. This small piece is a tribute to his masterpiece, Wheatfield with Crows, from 1890.

Part of the Forces series, this work came about rather strangely. I experiment with textures all the time, and in this one, I was not happy with the results of my initial texture layer. I knew I had to shift it or throw it away, so I decided to see if I could get a second layer of textures to work on top of the first. To my surprise, it did, and it immediately reminded me of fields of tumbled beach grass. The force of the wind takes the individual strands of grass and tosses them in every direction, and when you look at them, they very often look like supreme chaos. Still, sometimes you can distinguish different layers of grass going completely different directions. It is this type of contradictory energy that intrigues me constantly.

I see this same energy in Van Gogh’s Wheat Field. Overall, the forces in the piece are headed in multiple directions at once, not unlike his mind and emotions.

I did not choose to include the crows. I felt like they were almost afterthoughts, and I did not want to complicate things.