December 09, 2004

The Online Gallery of Van Gogh's work. I was inpsired by this post on mefi to post an online gallery of another great artist. I'm sure all of you are familiar with his paintings, but for me Van Gogh's most exciting work is his drawings (the gallery has an unbelievable catalog of over 1000 of his drawings).

As someone who has worked in pen a lot, I'm totally blown away by what he can do with the medium. I don't remember where I read it, but Van Gogh talked about trying to reproduce the effects of color in his drawings by using texture instead. You could probably find exactly where he said it in the entire, unabridged collection of Van Gogh's letters. Some good examples of what he does with texture and space can be seen in this one or this one. Sometimes he just lets the texture carry him into a beautiful abstraction. For more information, I'd recommended checking out Bernard Chaet's phenomenal book The Art of Drawing.