My charmers and I have been enjoying painting during breaks in the day and evenings. Picasso's we are not but the youngest of us has great, great potential and I marvel at her ability to imagine something and recreate it faithfully on canvas ... well, paper. For me, its a relaxing break from reading, writing, and editing.I went to the local library and grabbed several art books for kids on Monet and Van Gogh. Ava recognized The Starry Night from one of her favorite shows, The Little Einsteins, and I stopped on The Church at Auvers depicted here. Funny, when I looked at this classic again I immediately looked for the creature from a 2010 Doctor Who episode called "Vincent and the Doctor" where the time traveler notices a grotesque creature in one of the windows and so he goes back in time to help the artist triumph over the beast and only then does the painting resort to its normal appearance. Silliness for sure. Anyway, I'm enjoying Van Gogh's art these days and felt like posting The Church at Auvers.
In a letter dated June 5, 1890, Van Gogh writes to his sister:
... I have a larger picture of the village church - an effect in which the building appears to be violet-hued against a sky of simple deep blue colour, pure cobalt; the stained-glass windows appear as ultramarine blotches, the roof is violet and partly orange. In the foreground some green plants in bloom, and sand with the pink flow of sunshine in it. And once again it is nearly the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery, only it is probably that now the colour is more expressive, more sumptuous. [from Van Gogh's Letters].