 Hi everybody and welcome to barns takeout. Thanks for joining me. My name is Martha Lucy and I'm deputy director for research interpretation and education at the barns. Today we're going to look at this still life by Van Gogh and I will show it to you in the barns foundation. This is in gallery two on the first floor and here you see it over in the corner hanging in opposite another van Gogh his postman. Both of these were painted in Oral in 1888. So back to the painting before that in 1886-87 Van Gogh was living in Paris with his brother Theo and he moved to Oral which is a town in Provence in the south of France in February of 1888 because he wanted to get away from the city. He wanted to be closer to nature. He wanted to form a utopian community of artists in the south but immediately upon arriving there he gets out into the landscape even though there's a frost. So again this is in February and we know that there's a frost because it's in a letter to his brother but that does not stop him. He goes out and he starts painting orchards. After he does that he then starts kind of zooming in on on still life paintings showing more individual flowers and the first thing that I want to point out here is just to look at the flowers because they are kind of individual and each one of them does have a sort of personality and this is so true of all of Van Gogh's flower still lifes like this one up at the top kind of poking its head up. Let's look just at the painting for a minute and just analyze the form and the colors and what he's doing here. You've got a blue table with just a very pale beautiful yellow simple background. The table though you can't see the edge of it. You can't see any of the edges and so the effect of that is that it reads almost like just this blue band that could almost be horizontal to the picture plane. So you just get this flat yellow and then this flat blue and then I love that how there's just this one stock that's out in the foreground. You know Van Gogh wants to focus on it. He wants to sort of explore it so let's get up close to that and the first thing I want to point out is you know we were just looking at the overall shadow but look at the shadow that this that this stock is casting here right underneath it and the way that he renders that you can see how the paint is broken up in that brush stroke and that's because the paint underneath it is so rough and so when he applies this blue there must not have been very much blue on the brush and he's good dragging it across and it's only catching on some of the bumps and so it you know he's deliberately kind of creating a sort of patchy shadowy effect but then also in other areas you can see like this stroke this this area here the blue and the cream underneath are kind of blending together so he's painting wet into wet so he's there's all sorts of stuff going on in every inch of this painting all sorts of different the different techniques and even just in the blue which looks you know the blue of the of the table which from a distance looks just kind of flat and like there's not much going on when you get up close you can see how much there is going on all sorts of different shades of blue brush strokes moving in in all all different directions the flowers are in a myolica base or or sort of pitcher and there's a teacup next to it and these are objects that appear in a lot of works in during the oral period he would he would make still lifes and use these objects in different kind of arrangements those are obviously lemons but the flowers are hard to identify at least they're hard for me to identify now the reason that I chose this one to talk about this week is because the Philadelphia flower show is coming up so if there's you know if if if people watching are horticulturists or you know expert gardeners please weigh in here and tell me what you think these flowers are because I am this is definitely not my area of expertise but I did do some little bit of you know online research and I talked to my mom who's a an amazing gardener she thinks that the the blue flowers are blue allium they do grow wild in the south of France you know during in the spring time early summer so that that could make sense so why still life for Van Gogh well still lifes first of all they were a cheap subject to paint you did not have to pay them to pose Van Gogh had very little money and couldn't always afford to pay models so still lifes were extremely convenient but I think more importantly at this point in his career he was becoming more and more obsessed with color and when he had been living in um when he had been living in Paris this was when he was kind of awakened to the possibilities of color because he had been introduced to the Impressionists and the Neo Impressionists so he's thinking about color when he's in Arles and think about think think about what flowers mean for somebody who's interested in color you know not only are they colorful but you can also arrange them into the different different combinations whatever you want and I think that that's an important thing to remember about still life painting in general is that usually you know it's not it's not that the artist just kind of happens upon this arrangement of objects on the table and decides to paint it he or she is choosing these things there was a lot of discussion in the air about color theory and Van Gogh was becoming interested in color theory um scientists were talking about theories of optical perception how colors are how colors register in the eye what happens in the eye when you see two colors next to each other this was one of the bigger questions um and artists and art theorists were picking up on these scientific and philosophical findings um one very influential theorist named Charles Blanc wrote especially about complementary colors and the effect that these colors have on the eye when they are placed right next to each other especially sort of in large amounts and complementary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel so they are so red is a complement of green um purple is a complement of yellow uh orange and blue and the idea was that and this was Blanc's idea that so many artists were picking up on was that when you put these colors together because of the way that the eye works you get the maximum luminosity that the colors in that that colors achieve their maximum intensity when they are placed next to their complement so artists are are sort of running with this including Van Gogh and he actually referred to his still lifes as color studies and let's just look at some of the color combinations in this painting I mean I think that the blue um background here he's obviously enjoying the yellow the way that that pops against it the way that when these two colors this sort of purplish blue and the is right up against the yellow it's doing something um it's achieving a sort of maximum vibrancy come look at this painting when you're at the barns enjoy the flower show if you're in town to see that um and if any if any of you horticulturists have any ideas about about what's represented here please write them into the comments um thank you and see you next time I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the barns foundation I hope you enjoyed barns takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation