The Paintings
During a period of bad weather Van Gogh worked on a second pair of "Les Alyscamps" paintings, which were taken from a vantage point above the lane and looking through the poplar trees, made in the studio. The yellow-orange of the leaves contrast to the violet-blue trunks of the poplar trees. This painting, made shortly after Gauguin's arrival in Arles, was unique to Van Gogh's body of work and representative of the artistic achievements found by two great artists working together. To Émile Bernard Van Gogh described the collaborative process as a pooling of thoughts and techniques where each artist creates their own unique work that is different, yet complements one another. Van Gogh believed that his pair of paintings Falling Autumn Leaves was just such a collaborative effort influenced by his own ideas as well as those of Gauguin and Bernard.
The paintings were made on Gauguin's jute which with Van Gogh’s brushstroke made a finished tapestry-like texture. The high vantage point represented in the work resembled that of Gauguin's Vision. Creating a composition of a landscape viewed through the trunks of trees was something used previously by Bernard. Van Gogh used complementary, contrasting colors to intensify the effect of each color. The blue poplar trunks against the yellow path of leaves. Green used against red. Violet was paired with apricot. To his sister, Van Gogh wrote of selection and placement of contrasting colors "which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple, which complete each other like man and woman."
Van Gog's imagination created the figures in the paintings. In one, a couple of a thin man with an umbrella is paired with a large woman, much like Van Gogh’s image of a woman he might settle down with. On the lane is also a red-dressed woman. The other painting holds a couple who walk along the lane between stone sarcophagi, a yellow sunset at their backs.
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Famous quotes containing the word paintings:
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards.... Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)