Lesson 2: Colours and feelings

• Kunst
• Middelbare school
• vmbo t, mavo, havo, vwo
• Leerjaar 1-3

Colours and feelings

Welcome the students back to the second lesson on Vincent van Gogh. You’ve brought the reproduction of The Harvest with you again. Explain that in this lesson we’ll be looking at the painting in a different way, focusing on colour and feelings. The students will also make a painting themselves, expressing how they feel at that moment.

You are now going to give the second lesson about Vincent van Gogh. Start by asking what the kids remember about the last lesson.

They already saw The Harvest last time, of course, but did they really look closely? We’re going to test whether they did with a game of Spot the Difference (6 differences in total). A little warming-up exercise for this lesson.

To make it a bit easier, the kids get to look at the museum edition for 30 seconds. Then drape a sheet over it.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

To avoid confusion, every modified version is marked with the words,

'What is wrong with this painting?'

You can ask the children to tell you their answers or circle the details on the board using the drawing function.

After every modified version, the original painting is shown again on the board. This will make it clear what was different about the previous version. It also allows the class to take another look at the original in preparation for the next version.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

Answer: The two lower works of art on the right-hand wall are missing.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

Answer: The cloth draped over the end of the bed was originally hanging next to the door on the left.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

Answer: Now there's only one pillow on the bed instead of two.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

Answer: The back of the chair next to the bed has disappeared.

Did you look closely?

Now find the difference!

Answer: The back of the chair next to the bed has disappeared.

Afterwards, you can briefly discuss the game. Was it easy or hard? Which difference was the hardest one to find?

Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige

Title: The Residence with Plum Trees at Kameido, from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo

Year: 1857

Artist: Camille Pissarro

Title: Haymaking, Éragny

Year: 1887

Explain: Vincent was always very focused on colour when he was painting. When he started out his use of colour was very different from in his final paintings. You can see this if you compare the two paintings on the slide. Ask the students what they notice about them.

Explain: inspired by French and Japanese artists, Vincent started using more and more colour. In his final paintings he used really bright colours and strong contrasts.

Click on the button to show an example of a Japanese woodcut and an impressionist painting.

Vincent liked painting outdoors. This was quite a new thing, which had been made possible by the invention of the paint tube around 1842. Tubes allowed him to take lots of different colours out with him to paint colourful landscapes on the spot. Before the tube was invented, artists would sometimes take very small amounts of paint with them in a pig’s bladder.

Vincent used a palette, and often also a palette knife, to mix his colours. He didn’t always need to mix his paints though, as you could buy lots of different colours ready-made.

There’s old gold, bronze, copper in everything now, you might say, and that, with the green blue of the sky heated white-hot, produces a delightful colour which is exceedingly harmonious, with broken tones à la Delacroix.    

Artist: Eugène Delacroix

Title: Apollo Slays Python

Year: 1850

Explain: Vincent was very sensitive to colour, as you can read in his letters. He described how he experienced colour in nature. He wrote about this in a letter which mentions The Harvest: 

There’s old gold, bronze, copper in everything now, you might say, and that, with the green blue of the sky heated white-hot, produces a delightful colour which is exceedingly harmonious, with broken tones à la Delacroix.

What did Vincent mean by this?

If you click open the Delacroix painting, you can explain that this is the painter Vincent was talking about. He was a great example to him. Vincent even painted his own version of this Pieta.

Explain: Vincent knew about theories of colour, and he knew how to mix colours, which colours went together, and which ones didn’t. He was really interested in the effect colours had on each other.  

Show the colour wheel and explain how it works. On the inside are the three primary colours. You can’t make these by mixing other colours. In the ring around them are the secondary colours, which are made by mixing primary colours. The outer ring shows the tertiary colours, which you get by mixing secondary colours.

Colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel have what we call ‘complementary contrast’. These colours are so far apart that they enhance each other (make each other stronger) if they appear close together in a painting.

Ask the students what strong colour contrasts they can see. The red of the hat is set off by the intense green of the background. 

Colours

• What colour contrasts do you see in The Harvest?
• What colour harmonies do you see in The Harvest?
• Where can you see broken colours?

Have the students pair up and think about the following questions:

What colour contrasts do you see in The Harvest?

What colour harmonies do you see in The Harvest?

Where can you see broken colours?

Then discuss with the whole class.

Cheerful

Angry

Sad

Scared

Surprised

Irritated

Peaceful

Safe

Artist Vincent van Gogh
Title The Bedroom
Date October 1889
Location Arles, France
Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Proud

Explain: What we have found out so far is that you can make colours look nicer by being clever about how you use them (think about the plate of food). But colours can also produce certain feelings.
Vincent always wanted to express a feeling in his paintings. He thought about this when he was choosing his colours.

Look at the painting of The Bedroom together.
Click on the hotspots and ask the students to explain what feeling they would associate with the painting and why.

Vincent wrote about his choice of colours, ‘I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones’.

This painting shows Vincent's bedroom in the Yellow House in Arles (in southern France). He had furnished the room himself, with simple furniture and his own art works on the wall.

Then explain that Vincent van Gogh wanted this painting to give a feeling of intense calm.

Some paintings by Van Gogh are very discoloured, so it’s no longer possible to see the exact colours that he used. In the case of The Bedroom lots of the red pigments have disappeared, so the purple wall (= red + blue) is now just blue. The red paint that Vincent used was very poor quality. Experts have made a reconstruction of what The Bedroom would have looked like originally.
Which version is calmer: the painting as it is now (blue wall) or the reconstruction (purple wall)? 

Lonely

Angry

Sad

Stable

Surprised

Panicky

Calm

Safe

Exhausted

Artist Vincent van Gogh
Title Garden of the Asylum
Date December 1889
Location Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France
Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Now do the same with this painting. First, ask the students which emotion they most associate with the painting.

Vincent wrote that the colour combination in this work 'gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called "seeing red"'.

This is the garden of the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy, Vincent stayed there voluntarily for treatment for a year.

Then tell them that Vincent wrote that he wanted to express the anxiety that he noticed in many of his fellow patients when he painted it. The painting shows the garden of the institution where he stayed for a year after the incident with his ear. He used the strong contrast between red and green to express this anxiety.

Lonely

Happy

Sorrowful

Frightened

Excited

Jealous

Calm

Gloomy

Vulnerable

Artist Vincent van Gogh
Title Wheatfield under Thunderclouds
Date July 1890
Location Auvers-sur-Oise, France
Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Now do the same thing with this painting. Get the students to say what feeling they associate with it.

'They’re immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.'

In the final weeks of his life, Vincent made a number of impressive paintings of the wheatfields around Auvers, near Paris. This is one of them.

Then tell them that Vincent wrote that he painted the big, empty landscape to express extreme loneliness.

And what about The Harvest? Get the students to think about what feeling goes with this painting.

Five minute meditation.

We’re now going to use meditation to discover more about the feeling that goes with The Harvest. Do you know what that is? Have you ever done it before?

Make space for the students to lie on the floor. If it’s not clean, or it’s too cold, ask them to sit in a comfortable position.

After the meditation, ask the students to remain lying or sitting quietly for a moment.

Explain: during the meditation you might have noticed how you felt at some point. Maybe you felt calm or agitated, or you felt tired or wanted to laugh. Anything really. Take time to think about how you felt at that moment. In the meantime, I’m going to hand out the paper you will be painting on in a moment. Write what feeling you experienced on the back of the paper.

Assignment: Look at The Harvest again. Which colours in this painting would you like to use in your own painting? Base your choice on the feeling you wrote down, and choose four colours that go with it.

Try to mix them as precisely as possible, so they really are the same as the colours in the painting.
Use the three primary colours + black and white. Explain that white lightens colours, and black makes them appear heavier.

Once the colours are right, paint them in the boxes  on the worksheet. Write beneath each colour how you made it. Also note what proportions you need (e.g. equal parts red & blue + small dab of white).   This will allow you to make precisely the same colour again if necessary.

Assignment: choose one element from The Harvest. Something that goes with the feeling you wrote down.
What might you choose if you feel strong? (e.g. the house, stands firmly on the ground)
What could you choose if you feel restless? (e.g. the horse, which you could picture rearing up)
What would you choose if you felt tired? (e.g. the haystack – you can sleep in it)
Now, make a painting inspired by your chosen subject. If you choose the haystack, for example, make your own painting of a haystack. You don’t need to copy the one in The Harvest, you can paint it as you wish. The painting might help you to paint a nice haystack if you look at it carefully. Then choose for yourself how you want to do it.
If your feeling is ‘tired’, and you prefer to paint a bed (you could fall asleep in either of them), that’s also fine.

Have you decided what you’re going to paint?

Step 1: sketch the picture using charcoal. Just sketch the most important lines very thinly.

Step 2: Now start painting. Use the four colours you mixed earlier. Add other colours if you want to.

The main thing is that you try to put your feeling into the painting.

Reflection

Discuss the paintings.
What went well?
What would you do differently next time?
Which colours are you pleased with?
Did you manage to express your feeling?

Ask if anyone can see a combination of three or four paintings that go together, and group them. Why do they go together? Is it because of the colour, the subject, the feeling? 

Explain: Vincent was proud of The Harvest. In a letter to his brother he said it put the rest of his work to shame. Are you proud of your painting? If you are, put your signature on it!
When Vincent was proud of a painting he would sometimes sign it in a very obvious way. His name is in a very obvious place in Sunflowers, and he signed Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in red, though he later decided that was a bit over-the-top. 

Explain: You will need to do a little preparation for the next lesson. Show the students that Vincent sometimes painted objects to say something about their owner. Here, for example, he painted a chair belonging to his friend, the artist Paul Gauguin. It shows that he really liked reading.

Assignment: Next lesson, bring along something that says something about you. No bigger than a shoebox. Choose something three-dimensional (so not a photo, nothing flat, no mobile phones). You’re going to be using it in your next piece of art.