This is week 4 in my series of “Imitating the Masters.” I’m actually surprised that I’ve kept up with it thus far. As promised, I worked on copying a Van Gogh painting this time.

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter, who lived from 1853 to 1890. If you do the math, that means he died at age 37 – more on that later. He was the very definition of tortured artist. He showed early signs of mental instability which he never really overcame. He worked as an art dealer as a young man. At one point, he threw himself into religion, probably hoping to defeat the demons in his life, and even spent time as a missionary in Belgium.

Eventually Vincent drifted into a life of solitude, having poor health as well. He was in and out of psychiatric hospitals with depression and psychotic episodes, and famously mutilated his ear with a razor in one of his bad spells. These days we would call him a “hot mess.” Most of what we know about him, we know from his correspondence with his brother Theo. The day came when he could endure life no more: he shot himself in the chest. This, amazingly, did not kill him. He was able to walk back to town, but two days later he died from an infection to the wound. His last words were “The sadness will last forever,” haunting words.

Over his lifetime, Van Gogh did over 2,100 pieces of art, coming to a style that featured bold colors and dramatic brush work. Over 800 of those paintings he did in his last two years! He painted “Van Gogh’s Chair” (also called “The Chair and the Pipe”) in 1888, using oil on canvas. I found out that the box in the painting was an onion box! He chose to paint this one in the complimentary colors of blue and orange and said that he “sought an effect of light with bright color.” It hangs in the National Gallery in London.

I have continued to struggle with getting proportions correct, something I’ll be working on in future paintings. I didn’t aim to get exact color matches; mine is a great deal brighter than Van Gogh’s. If you look carefully at mine, you’ll see a major change I made, putting my mark on the painting. Wink, wink.

Next week: Henri Matisse!

And now I’m singing to myself Don McLean’s song, “Starry, Starry Night,” about Vincent Van Gogh.

I’ll probably cram this into an onion box in the morning.

When we were homeschooling our children, I bought an art appreciation curriculum called “Look, Mommy, It’s a Renoir!” It came with small reproductions of many paintings done by a variety of artists spanning centuries and demonstrating many different styles. I’m using those now as my inspiration as I attempt to “imitate the masters.”

This week’s painting is called “Woman, Bird and Star” by Joan Miro, a Spanish artist who lived from 1893 to 1983. I’d heard of Miro before but didn’t realize until doing some research for this post that Joan Miro was a man. Didn’t see that coming.

Like Albrecht Durer, Miro’s father was a goldsmith, although Miro’s father was also a watchmaker. Miro developed an early interest in art. At his first solo art show in 1918 (at the tender age of 25), his work was ridiculed and defaced. Since some of his work now sells for millions of dollars, Miro clearly rose above this early humiliation. He struggled with depression, however, and used painting as a way of dealing with it.

“Woman, Bird and Star” was an oil painting that was completed on the day that Pablo Picasso died (April 8, 1973), so Miro dedicated this work to him. A prominent visual motif in Miro’s paintings is birds. He once said of his work, “In my paintings, there is a kind of circulatory system. If even one form is out of place, the circulation stops; the balance is broken.”

I’m pretty sure that the star portion of this painting is on the left, under the black ball. But as far as being able to see the woman and the bird, your guess is as good as mine. And maybe it doesn’t matter.

It was kind of fun working on this one. Since it is abstract and symbolic in nature, I didn’t concern myself with trying to make it a perfect copy. But I’m not sure that Miro would be happy with the circulatory system in it; the balance might be broken.

Next week: on to Vincent Van Gogh (whom Miro was inspired by).

I’m intrigued by the box with the name “Vincent” on it. What is that object in it? A toy?

Bidding you adios, amigos! This post may have to be deleted in the morning if I detect balance being broken.

Continuing on with my project of imitating some of the masters in painting, I tackled a painting called “General Washington on a White Charger.” The copy I have doesn’t attribute it to a particular painter, just “American School,” which is unhelpful.

I had to do some research on this, but the internet was very coy and not forthcoming on the topic. Nobody seemed willing to commit on what the American School was or who its painters were. I finally found one site that definitively attributed the painting to Nathaniel Currier, he of Currier and Ives fame. He lived from 1813 to 1888 and supposedly did this oil painting in 1845. His training was as a lithographer. Other tidbits: he served as a volunteer fireman in New York City, was a Unitarian, and a personal friend of P.T. Barnum (yes, the circus guy).

This was a really difficult painting! The original was oil, very detailed, and quite a bit larger in real life. My watercolor rendition is a lot messier. It looks better the farther away you are from it, but in case you want to get a better idea of the things I fudged on:

My purpose for copying paintings, however, was to learn as I go. I learned from this one that a lot of exquisite detail in a small space takes more talent than I’ve got. Having said that, I ended up being happy with the horse’s legs, his eye, and Washington’s pant leg. My Washington has a wry half-smile, as opposed to the more serious look in the original, but mine is rather more like an emoji face than I think is appropriate.

I’m going to give myself a little break and work on this painting by Joan Miro next week:

Maybe it will be a lot harder than I think.

Time to take off on the blog charger in the morning.