Art

In this paper, I will express the thought and feeling that Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, Bank of the Oise at Auvers, Oil on canvas, 1890, gives me. Bank of the Oise at Auvers depicts eleven small boats on the bank of the river Oise in France. A woman is seated in one boat and a man and woman are standing on the shore. I did not wonder into the Detroit Institute of Arts trying to find a painting to write about for an assignment, I entered the museum though, hoping for a painting to notice me and speak to me. That is exactly what this work accomplished. The work caught my eye in a noticeable fashion. What I noticed the most were the boldness of the brush strokes, and how the colors expressed do not blend carefully with each other, but rather they all individually stand out. You can notice very easily the direction in which the strokes are heading, and what message they are trying to convey. There are many reasons that I chose this painting, and I will go into fine detail throughout the course of the paper of exactly what I mean.
This specific work, unframed, is 28 7/8 x 36 7/8 in. It is a horizontal work. This painting looks as if it were a photograph, so the relation to the shapes on the edges appear to be unaffected and seem to go past the edges, therefor, looks uninterrupted. To me, the colors look harmonious, because they all look like they are “cool” colors, meaning shades relating to the color blue. In contrast, they could also be debated as discordant in some areas, for instance, in the upper right corner, where you would guess the artist tried to make the colors resemble some sort of forest-like background, you cannot specifically distinguish exactly what the colors and brush strokes are trying to express. It is unclear whe...

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...oughts and feeling would be mostly the heaviness, and darkness of the brush strokes. It is almost as though I could feel the emotion Van Gogh had when he was painting this work. This is in fact the one and only work at the Detroit Institute of Art that caught my eyes and actually made me interested to find out just why exactly the work made me feel the way I did. These brush strokes were what made Van Gogh so unique, and I now see why. They make you think and feel. No other work of art has ever successfully done any such thing to me. Van Gogh’s work represents, in many fashions, the quest for self-serenity, as seen by the figures all relaxing by a riverbank. What this work gave me was the knowledge to be able to understand artworks, and be able to perhaps decipher what the artist is implying, and that art is much more than simply a bunch of colors made into a scene.