Van Gogh Sunflower Impasto

 

Tempera paint, thickened with glue and cornmeal, is used in an impasto technique to recreate Van Gogh's famous painting, Sunflowers.

 

Materials

  • 9” x 12” white drawing paper
  • white glue
  • cornmeal
  • Medium paintbrushes
  • Scratch paper
  • Water
  • Paper towels
  • Tempera paint in orange, yellow green, black, and white

Directions

  1. Discuss the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. View several of his paintings including "Sunflowers." Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who used vivid colors and wild brush strokes in his paintings. His over 750 paintings, all of them produced during a period of only 10 years, show through their striking colour and coarse brushwork the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The Starry Night.

Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in the Netherlands, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament. By the age of 27, he had been a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers. Dark and somber, these early works show van Gogh's desire to express the misery and poverty as he saw it among the miners.

Vincent van Gogh is believed to have taken a medicine called digitalis.  Large doses of digitalis caused van Gogh to see mostly yellow and gold.  It also caused his vision to blur, and made him see halos around objects. Digitalis also made van Gogh lose his temper.  Sometimes he would get so mad, he couldn't control his temper. He also had many other hard times.  He fell in love with his cousin Kate, but she rejected him.  Van Gogh always had bad luck with women.  Then in 1885, van Gogh's father died.  When his father died, van Gogh was even more depressed, so he went to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris.

In Paris, van Gogh became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. He started painting with the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.

In 1888, van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles and Starry Night. Van Gogh met the painter Paul Gauguin and they started painting together. After less than two months, they began to have violent disagreements, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor. The same night, in deep remorse, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. He then spent a year in an asylum, working between repeated spells of madness. Under the care of a sympathetic doctor, van Gogh spent three months at the asylum. Just after completing his ominous Crows in the Wheatfields, he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later.

  1. Prepare the thickened paint right before the lesson begins. If you mix this paint too early, it may thicken up too much for the lesson. Just add a little water to thin. Mix tempera with a roughly equal amount of white glue. Slowly add cornmeal until consistency looks like thick cake batter. Each student only needs a few spoonfuls of each the orange and yellow thickened paint.

  2. Mix regular orange tempera paint with a bit of yellow, and add white to get a peachy color for the vase. Paint a vase at the bottom half of the paper.

  3. Mix a little black into some orange paint, and paint the table.

  4. Using the thickened orange and/or yellow paint, paint 3 to 5 flower centers, spacing the centers to leave room for the petals. Paint some orange and some yellow flower centers. Make sure they are large ovals.

  5. Next, using a contrasting color of thickened paint, paint the petals. Start from the edge of the flower centers and brush quickly outwards. Use yellow petals for the orange centers, and orange petals for the yellow centers. This should all be done with the thickened cornmeal paint.

  6. Dip just the tip of the brush into the black paint, and add small spots to the centers of the flowers.

  7. Finally, use the regular tempera paint to draw in the stems. Draw stems from the flowers to the vase. Point out that the stems shouldn’t go through the petals, but should go “behind” them, stopping at the top of the vase.

(Note on cleanup: Don’t throw the thickened paint down the sink drain, since it contains glue and could clog. It’s safer to throw it in the trash.)