Vincent van Gogh created, “Wheat Field with Cypresses”, in 1889 on canvas using oil paints. Today, it is on display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Wheat Field with Cypresses” was created during the post-impressionism era; showing abstract paint strokes that were color dominated, containing heavy movement, showing a window into the artists’ mind and soul. “Wheat Field with Cypresses” depicts a hot, windy summer day. Van Gogh uses rich gold’s and yellows to show the brightness of the wheat, and soft blues to represent the calm blue sky.
Then he used a dark green for the cypress tress which draws your attention to this as the focal point. The use of the color schemes consisting of different shades of yellows, blues, and greens gives the painting a sense of harmony. These colors are analogous to one another on the color wheel. As I look at this piece I see yellow and blue separated by the color green. Add yellow and blue together and you have created green, which in this piece is mainly right, with a continuous thin line through in the middle where the two colors meet.
While observing the wheat, you notice that it flows and bends to the right to draw your attention to the tree, while the clouds have a light airy feel to provoke the heavy mountains directly below them. Everything within the picture creates a circular motion connecting one thing to the next. Creating a flowing motion from the tree, to the sky, to the wheat, and back to the tree. Van Gogh uses many circular shapes to help you glide through the painting without the sharp harsh lines some artists create. He varies them in size, thus making the painting appear as if it were layered.
Even noting that the sky is the fullest part of the painting, taking up a majority of the space, with the thickest looking paint. As we look upward from shrubs in the foreground, to the flowing field and the rolling shrubs, we eventually come to the round aged mountains in the beyond. When you first look at the painting as a whole, your focal point lands right on the tree, causing you to think of the title, “Wheat Field with Cypresses”. The shape of the cypress tree; tall and triangular, lifts us towards the mountains in the distance, up to the flowing sky with swirling clouds. This gives the painting more life like qualities.
Van Gogh knew the importance of the cypress tree, but did not feel the need to place it in the dead center. Instead, he chose to put it off to the right, so that while our eye would still be drawn there, the viewer would also get a sense of the beautiful surrounding landscape. It seems as if Van Gogh is trying to give the impression that he painted this picture as a whole, instead of observing every nitty-gritty detail. He painted it as if you were driving by taking a quick glance at the scenery around you, instead of you sitting there, focusing on every minor detail around you. When Van Gogh created this picture he was in an insane asylum.
Which causes you to wonder if this painting was painted at this exact scene, or rather, an imaginary place that Van Gogh longed for while he was locked away? Van Gogh creates a unified experience with each brush stroke invoking the feeling of you standing in this wheat field. The brush strokes are very noticeable and broad, creating movement, depth and vibrancy. The beauty shown within the clouds, trees, and wheat, all blowing in the wind draw the viewer in. In the sky, Van Gogh uses broad mixtures of blues swirling among the clouds offering a soft resting place for our eyes. The wheat looks ripe and lush, giving it a sense of abundance.
While having very noticeable brush stokes within the cypress tree, to draw our eye in immediately, Van Gogh balances the background with a soft blended strokes of blue and white for the mountains and sky. The light throughout the painting is coming form a consistent source. This rounds out the objects and gives them a sense of depth, feeling, and dimension. The light doesn’t indicate which direction it is coming from, only that it is directly overhead evoking the feeling of warmth. Van Gogh was a post impressionism painter. He used his personal emotions and experiences to bring a creation to life on canvas.
Each stroke depicted a sense of what the artist viewed, and what was interpreted through his heart, mind, and soul. Van Gogh used a specific order of paint and symbolic colors to express the emotions he was feeling, leaving a personal effect on the painting. You can see the influence of the impressionism era which was more abstract and flowing, rather than precise life like detail. In conclusion, I was initially drawn to this painting by the atmospheric qualities that it possessed. The painting causes me to imagine myself within the scene that has been created, feeling the warmth of the sun, and rustling of the wheat.
Even bringing myself to imagine what could lie beyond the borders of the painting. The swirling brush strokes, on the canvas and the symbolic cypress are conveying the feelings that Van Gogh was experiencing. Van Gogh painted a majority of his pieces with this signature of emotion. In this specific piece, he is trying to show God’s exposure to nature mixed with his emotions and feelings to what he saw depicted through swirling strokes and abstract nature. After seeing this piece, I observed online the other two paintings that were created to go with this one in a series of three, which are similar to one another.
I also viewed “Starry Night”. In each one you notice the swirling strokes, the heavy emotion in each one, and how a cypress tree is the focal point in each one. While many things were similar, each emotion that was brought on from viewing the paintings, were different for each one. After seeing Van Gogh’s work in a museum and viewing others in pictures, I can appreciate his greatness. He is considered one of the best example of post-impressionism painters. His paintings invoke a sense of beauty with a bit of fancy. They make me want to look at the world around me in a new and better way.