The Backstory of Vincent Van Gogh’s Cypresses: A Mind intwined with Simple and Impetuousness | Absinthe and Hallucination | Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
Why Gogh obsesses about Cypresses? The recent show in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first show that focuses on trees and his life during that time.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses is on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with manuscripts, illustrated letters, and paintings. The show is the first Van Gogh show which focuses on the trees and his most famous motif, “Cypresses”
The exhibition included 40 works and showcased the period when Van Gogh started to develop Cypresses and finished his “The Starr Night” as the greatest masterpiece of all time.
During the time without email and the internet, Van Gogh sent out mails to his peer artists and his brother, Theo. The mails documented his inspiration to start to draft Cypresses and the landscapes.
Imagine the scenes, the countryside of Provence in France, the town of Arls, shelters, bedrooms, and studios. A recent study indicated Van Gogh died of temporal lobe epilepsy. Absinthe was popular and it caused Van Gogh to get worse for his mental illness.
Van Gogh developed his cypresses series from illustrated letters and his observation from the countryside of Provence and his studio, and bedroom in his asylum in Saint Remy.
Cypresses as his motifs surrounded with other elements such as flowers, gardens, and sky.
He transformed the simple environment into a world of flames and the distortions of trees and stars.
One interesting takeaway is his tools, his illustrations use reed pen, it gives a rustic taste and you can see the touches from his sketch.
Normally when we do sketching, the images are stored in our brains by short-term memory, Van Gogh can sense the very tiny differences in the air and catch them in his painting. His works show 3D motion like waves and flames.
Van Gogh influenced many artists, including me. I made derivatives with his public domain artworks. I used glitches and code to make a new concept of work.
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