So, back to France for this piece. While in France, I visited Cafe la Nuit in Arles, where Van Gogh painted. It was so inspiring to be in the same place where such an iconic artist breathed inspiration as well. This is Van Gogh's piece that he completed while looking down the street in Arles and with which I drew inspiration from.
Getting to eat at this place was such a unique experience and I knew I needed to capture it in a piece. I chose to work with a similar color pallette as Van Gogh to try to capture his essence so I stuck with mostly with blues and yellows. I separated my board into a yellow section and blue section very similar to how Van Gosh divided up his space. I started layering various papers as well as photo transfers from actual photographs I took while visiting.
This is one of the few pieces in my concentration that is not solely based off of a single photo; rather, I combined various photos as well as ideas. I decided to incorporate sunflowers into the piece because Van Gogh painted sunflowers frequently which made a lot of sense to me, seeing field after field of sunflowers in the surrounding areas.
This is the only piece in my concentration with which I used pen heavily. I usually don't use black but I thought it would really make certain areas stand out nicely. I did a lot of layering in this piece and some stenciling which was something new for me. I think the stencils, especially the polka dot stencil in the sky, add a really creative touch to the piece. This piece is definitely one of my favorites in my concentration as I think that it was very successful and brought me right back to Arles while working on it.
In Progress:
In Progress:
Final Piece: