Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, 

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Vincent Van Gogh reminds me a lot of Jimi Hendrix. It seems like the analogy, and that there's this guy who was other worldly figure who played the guitar in a completely different way. And I feel like this painting is the best one to describe that. 

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell Iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool people are Steven Gladfelter, a museum docent, and Andrew Palamara, assistant Director of Docent Learning. Today's episode is a tour of Van Gogh into the undergrowth. You can enjoy it either from the comfort of your home or hopefully in person as you look at the exhibition with us. Special exhibition tickets are free for museum members, $10 for general public, $5 for children, ages six to 17 and free for children five. And under the exhibition will also have free admission on Thursdays five to 8:00 PM and during Art After Dark, if you are listening in person, make your way up to the exhibition entrance on the second floor and we will begin our tour. So I'm here now with Andrew Palamara and your title is? 

Speaker 2 (01:32):
I'm the Assistant Director for Docent Learning 

Speaker 3 (01:35):
And Steven Gladfelter. I have been a docent since 2008, so I give tours to the public on weekends. 

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Alright. And we are here to look at Van Gogh into the 

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Undergrowth. 

Speaker 1 (01:45):
So we are at the front of the exhibit right now. And do you have any sort of intro for us before we look at the show or 

Speaker 3 (01:53):
I'd like to start with the first piece, which is to our left and it's a dark painting and we can move over there. 

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Yeah, let's go to it. 

Speaker 3 (02:01):
And it is a characteristic of Van Gogh's early period while he was in the Netherlands. 

Speaker 1 (02:08):
So we're looking at Girl in the Woods and it's pretty obvious because it is a painting of a girl in the 

Speaker 3 (02:14):
Woods. 

Speaker 2 (02:16):
They nailed the title on this, 

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Right? They nailed this one. 

Speaker 3 (02:20):
So when I see this painting, what I notice is how much interest Van Gogh is putting into nature, the natural setting. And I think that that is characteristic of where he's drawing some influences from with the Barbon School. 

Speaker 1 (02:38):
So what's that? What's the Barbon 

Speaker 3 (02:40):
School, Andrew? I mean, I'll be happy to take it. Yeah, go ahead. 

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, we just act like we know what that is. Every time somebody says, oh, show up the Barbon 

Speaker 3 (02:49):
School. Of course, yes. So the Barbon School takes its name from a city on the edge of the Fbl Forest, which is to the southeast of Paris outside the city outskirts. It's a group of artists that were interested in getting away from the industry and the commerce and the city and getting back to a more natural returning to nature. It sort of coincides with, if you think about what's going on at the time, this is 19th century, mid 19th century France, you think of Industrial Revolution, you think of actual revolutions going on. I mean at the period where this painting was done in 1870 where in the third Republic of France. And the fact that I have to qualify that with Third tells you how much unrest there is going on at the time. So this Barb Design School was interested in depicting nature and telling you something true about it. 

Speaker 3 (03:49):
So when you are looking at it, they are showing you a scene, but they're also trying to describe to you using their paint method, something that they notice about the tree. And here you can see in this painting of the Girl Forest, how much detail he's putting into the trees and depiction of this strong base of the tree. And the fact that there's a girl in the painting, he writes in a letter to his brother, Theo, I believe that it's actually, he put her in there for scale. So that was probably the least important part of the painting is the girl. 

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah. But without her, it is interesting. You could imagine these trees is much smaller and that we're kind of zoomed in. If you just sort of imagine her not there, these roots would feel, I feel a lot smaller than they do now. Now it feels like this huge vast forest, whereas without there it's like, yeah, it's my backyard. 

Speaker 3 (04:49):
So what the viewers going to first notice about this painting is what they have in their mind when they see a Van Gogh painting is an iconic Van Gogh. You think sunflowers, you think the fields of Antwerp, you think Starry Night. You don't think this dark painting that you see here. That's characteristic of his time. When he was in the Netherlands working for the first half of his career, which started in 1880, he had about a 10 year career as a painter. And it didn't really get into, he didn't really start his iconic, what you think of when you see Van Gogh until about halfway through his career in 1886 when he travels to Paris. 

Speaker 2 (05:39):
That seems to be pretty common with a lot of big name painters, is that they start out in a mode that's very different from what they're known for. So I think it's really cool that we have this painting at the front of the exhibition to really show how someone develops from the start of their career until what we really know them by. 

Speaker 1 (06:00):
And it feels like a somewhat InBetween, the kind of barbon schools palette of much more muted browns. But then with getting into the sort of more wild brush strokes we expect from Van Gogh, it's somewhere in between the two worlds I feel like, of where he is going to end up and where we started from. So it is an interesting, 

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, there's still something very visceral about the painting. You can see a little bit of the imposter technique, which is when there's a lot of paint built up on the surface and you can see it as opposed to just seeing faint strokes or the picture before you see any of the brush strokes. So not as much as what you see in later Van Gogh, but there are some traces 

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Of it in this one. 

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Well, the next one I wanted to talk about was the Monet. 

Speaker 1 (06:46):
You're going to want to turn to your right and walk straight ahead to the painting on the wall straight ahead. It's Claude Monet re the font ble, 

Speaker 2 (06:56):
And if you need some extra help, Claude Monet's name is signed in the bottom right corner with a giant T. The one letter you don't say is the one you see. Exactly. 

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Put up a lot of emphasis and then you don't even get to say it. What a downer. Yeah. 

Speaker 3 (07:12):
So painters are returning back to the forest of font blue to paint what they see there almost as an homage to the Barbon school. So Monnet goes there, he and this painting, when I look at it and I ask what is a subject? What do you think is the subject of this painting when you look at it? 

Speaker 1 (07:37):
I guess to me the subject of the painting is light in shadow, really. 

Speaker 2 (07:43):
I mean, I feel like most people would guess the trees, what you see first. 

Speaker 3 (07:49):
Right. But the interesting thing when I see it, how the light is filtered through the woods that really responds to where Monet goes in his career later. He's really interested in the light and the light of a particular time of day especially. 

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, I mean for me it's just the trees are so, even though they are 

Speaker 3 (08:11):
The 

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Focal point of the painting, the way that the edges are kind of just not as important as the most defined thing are these little dapples of light and on the ground and the way they even hit the trunks are really the only way we even see the trunk. 

Speaker 3 (08:30):
So to 

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Me it's about that light. And then seeing the inverse of that in the trees too, where we have the sky breaking through the leaves. 

Speaker 2 (08:39):
Well, and the shadow plays such a big part too. It takes up a third of the painting and you may not even be aware of it when you look at it for the first five seconds, but gradually you look more and there's this really big delineation. It takes up a big part. 

Speaker 3 (08:56):
So I was going to move on. We can talk about the next to the middle wall as you are the painting undergrowth. This piece is a blue and green depiction of a forest floor, and it was painted in 1889 while Van Gogh was institutionalized in an asylum. So it was painted on the asylum grounds. So the painting itself has an interesting story, and when you're looking at the painting, you see rough brush strokes, you see the iconic thickly applied paint. You see the blues and greens and colors mixed together. You think of when you think of Van Gogh. So this is after he's, we should probably talk about when he makes this change into this new style that happens in 1876 after he is traveled to Paris and seen painters like Claude Monet and scene painters like Renoir. And those color palettes are totally different than the earlier piece we were just looking at Girl in the Woods. 

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah. This is getting definitely where I think most people would expect a Van Gogh painting to look like just pallet wise and also brushstroke wise too, with all these really aggressive little dabs everywhere that kind of has a shimmery effect. 

Speaker 2 (10:38):
Yeah. Well, I mean to your point, Steven, you see a merger of those two things because in the background you see some of the orange in the brown that's in the very first painting, but then it's dominated by the green and the blue and it even looks like there might be some purple in the tree trunks. It might be the orange too, but it just, yeah, it explodes. It's a pretty trippy painting to be honest. I mean, the way that the tree trunks curve it, I mean when I first saw this, I thought that some of it might've been submerged in water and it's creating reflection. And now that I look at it more closely, I realize I was wrong. But 

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, I think it's all just that ivy that's just bouncing light everywhere. But it is interesting. If you take just about, I don't know, if you were to imagine just the bottom half of this painting without the top half, it just becomes a completely abstract piece, doesn't it? 

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Oh, totally. 

Speaker 1 (11:36):
It's a field of color. 

Speaker 3 (11:38):
It's like the Monet's water release where he gives you enough to have a toehold into the picture to have an understanding of what you're looking at. But that's it. You just have this tiny little sliver at the top and that's where your eye can enter the piece. 

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah. It's kind of an interesting exercise to put your arm up around one half and see what it looks like compared to just focusing on the bottom half. Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (12:04):
We should say put your arm up by yourself, not actually close to the painting. No, don't do that. You'll make security very unhappy if you 

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Do that. Very frowned upon in museums. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Don't put your arms anywhere near the painting, but you can block it up close to your own head. 

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Double arms length in 

Speaker 1 (12:19):
This case. 

Speaker 3 (12:22):
So this painting also has two companions. The next one that I want to show you or take you to gives you an understanding of how controlled and how thought out how practiced Van Gogh was. His painting wasn't even though his brush strokes in this painting especially appear haphazard or accidental, they were not. He was very studied. And we have what we believe to be a study for this piece or a sketch that you would do in preparation of doing a final finished piece. And that's right around the corner here. 

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Otherwise you're approaching, my kid could do that territory and 

Speaker 1 (13:04):
That's 

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Not necessarily fair. 

Speaker 1 (13:07):
So we walked to the left of the painting and then sort of flipped around. This is a really hard to describe, isn't it where we are, but this one is called tree trunks with Ivy, also by Van Gogh. 

Speaker 3 (13:21):
And in this piece you see the same scene, you could actually recognize the same tree trunk, the same curvature of the tree trunk, similar cropping you're focusing in on the forest floor, similar paint handling. It has rough brush strokes, has thickly applied paint, little smaller in scale, but it's clearly done at the same time in the same place. And so for that reason, it's interesting to compare these two by the same painter, one being a finished work and one being not necessarily unfinished, but just like a practice piece in preparation of doing a final piece. So he is working out his composition, he's working out what he thinks about the scene, what's important to him. He sees this tree that he becomes the focus point of the other painting. 

Speaker 2 (14:23):
It also seems like it's a way for him to figure out what the texture should look like in the final form. 

Speaker 1 (14:30):
The ivy comes across as much more reflective in the first one we looked at, I think here, I mean there's little areas that feel like they're bouncing light, but not quite as much as that kind of bright white light that we get, I think in the one we just came from. Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (14:47):
No, this looks more like it was carved into 

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Rather 

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Than add it on. 

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Any other smart things. 

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Well, 

Speaker 1 (14:56):
You got any other smart thoughts? Smart, 

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Smart guys. 

Speaker 1 (14:59):
What else you got? 

Speaker 3 (15:00):
I'd like to talk about some other post-impressionist painters that are contemporary to Van Gogh. And so for that, I think the OT would be a good piece. 

Speaker 3 (15:09):
So we move around here in front of the park bench, there is a OT painting, and again, this is a painting of a tree. So this is obviously dominated by trees. You have mostly green background. And RAD is the painter, if you are familiar with the Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande shot, the pointless piece that's in the Chicago Art Museum. And RAD is interested in color study. So Van Gogh is seeing all of these different contemporary painters and being influenced by how they're working. That's one thing that can't be understated about Van Gogh is that he is consumes art. He goes to museums and looks at other painters avidly. And we know that from his letters. So there's some pieces in here that we can know that he's written to his friends and family about looking at other artists. So the Syrah has the color study of the Pointilism, the purpose being that when allowing the colors to mix in your eye and not on the canvas. So he's using individual little points to allow the colors to mix in your eye, believing that if you're using pure color on the canvas, it creates a more vivid impression in your mind's eye. 

Speaker 2 (16:55):
It does. 

Speaker 1 (16:56):
It's interesting. I was just thinking about how all of the paintings in the show are sort of dealing with the visual noise of the forest. And I was just thinking about that as that the forest is literally such a quiet place, but then visually it becomes so noisy. So you have Van Gogh's brushstrokes here, the dotting of Rah, and we get to see other artists how they deal with that idea. But it's interesting that it's this very complicated, dense thing, but it also lends itself well to this abstraction that we're kind of moving towards in art history as well. 

Speaker 2 (17:33):
And that's a good way to put it because anyone who experiments with Photoshop or even Instagram, you can add a noise filter to your photos and it looks a lot like this painting. 

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, 

Speaker 3 (17:43):
It also, what you just said, Russell speaks to what's going on in Van Gogh's mind. You have this when he's painting in the asylum, it's a period of healing for him, but he's got these rough brush strokes and this swirling of color and in this SRA that it's relatively peaceful, serene as an appearance, it comes off as a very quiet painting in that way. 

Speaker 1 (18:08):
Way. Yeah, definitely. Compared to the Van Goghs, definitely. 

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah. So f y I, when you're standing in front of it, maybe five or six feet away, with the lighting, you can't see the top of it as much. And just a forewarning, if you think that sitting down on the bench behind you is going to make it better, it will not. You actually just get 

Speaker 1 (18:28):
More glare. It will make it worse. But 

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Hey, 

Speaker 1 (18:31):
If your dogs are barking, 

Speaker 3 (18:34):
It's a great 

Speaker 1 (18:35):
Relief for that. 

Speaker 2 (18:35):
Or if you like light obscuring big chunks of painting you what I 

Speaker 1 (18:40):
Love. I love to go to the museum and just see the paintings just washed out by the lights. It's just my favorite thing. 

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Who doesn't? Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (18:47):
My favorite experience, 

Speaker 3 (18:49):
I thought the next painting we should talk about is the gon because they were such good friends. 

Speaker 1 (18:56):
And so we are turning around and walking 

Speaker 3 (18:58):
Pretty much directly 

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Behind 

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Where we were 

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Towards Sunken Path Wooded Rise by Paul Gogan. 

Speaker 3 (19:05):
So Gogan and Van Gogh lived together for a period and they had a difficult relationship for the people who know the story of Van Gogh. This is the end of that period of them living together culminated in him cutting off his ear. And so there's a personal relationship between these two artists. So they certainly looked, they worked together, they painted the same scenes together. So this is someone that he was looking to and influenced by. And so this painting was done before Van Gogh came to Paris. But you see again the same, the forest scene, you see how Gogan is moving towards the same brush work that you see in other artists that we consider post impressionists. 

Speaker 2 (20:04):
But this one is much more dry and texture and aesthetic than a lot of the others that we've looked at so far. I mean, it almost looks like it was done with oil pastel or colored pencil or something. I mean, it's very faint in saturation and contrast. 

Speaker 1 (20:24):
But it has a pretty different palette too, I think, than what a lot of the other paintings we've looked at in that it's bringing out this pretty intense orangey pink colors that we haven't seen before where I think the other artists we've looked at have relied more on a realistic brown of a forest floor here where we're getting some of gogans imaginative colors, which if you've seen the Gogan and the permanent collection with its very colorful. Palm trees 

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Are sort of 

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Related, I feel like. 

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah. And if at this point in the exhibition you're really sick of the color green, this gives you break a little bit of a break. 

Speaker 3 (21:07):
There's more to come though. Well, let's look at how Van Gogh handles trees in his late period here. 

Speaker 1 (21:16):
So we just walked 

Speaker 3 (21:19):
To 

Speaker 1 (21:19):
The left of the painting and heading farther ahead towards, what's this one called? 

Speaker 3 (21:27):
This is Tree Trunks in the Grass by Vincent Vanko. And they're 

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Really outlandish titles. I, I know 

Speaker 3 (21:38):
What I love about this painting is where I look at this work and again, looking at Van Gogh's career and how short this iconic period of his, what you think of when you see Van Gogh was, and then you look at this tree trunk and it makes you wonder, what would he have done with another 20 years of a career? I mean, it is showing you the roughness and the texture of the tree trunk and the blockiness of the bark, but it's just got all of these colors that you don't see necessarily when you think of when you see tree. And it's, it's going towards this abstraction of nature. That's what all of these artists are trying to get back to is they're picking up on the romanticism, the romantic movement in France, and they're picking up on getting back to this nature and finding out something, trying to tell you what they see about the natural world. And Van Gogh is just seeing all of this interesting texture and color and depicting something that looks like it might be headed towards total abstraction. 

Speaker 2 (22:54):
And before we started recording, I was telling you that Vincent Van Gogh reminds me a lot of Jimi Hendrix. It seems like the analogy and that there's this guy who this other worldly figure who played the guitar in a completely different way and really redefined what rock and roll music was. And I feel like this painting is the best one to describe that analogy because these tree trunks on the left have virtually every color that you could imagine. And they don't even look like tree trunks. They look like abstract paintings in the shape of tree trunks. 

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Yeah, I mean these tree 

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Trunks are just absolutely bonkers. This is the craziest thing in this show. I think every time I come to this painting, I just go like, this is nuts. 

Speaker 2 (23:36):
I know they don't have much dimension to them. They're very flat, but the color is insane. And I mean, to your point, like Jimi Hendrix, it makes me wonder what he could have done if he had had 20, 30 more years in his career. 

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, and they seem so ahead of their time and that if you just took those tree trunks and placed them next to some cubist paintings, they wouldn't feel like totally out of place. 

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh, not at all. 

Speaker 1 (24:04):
They are so ahead of their time in that way. But then it is funny because the rest of the scene is relatively, I mean, it's still wild for its time I guess, but compared to those tree trunks, it's like there's two different things happening, which is really interesting. Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (24:20):
That's another one. You could close your left eye, focus on the right side and then do 

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Meet 

Speaker 2 (24:24):
The left and explosion of color. 

Speaker 1 (24:27):
I think what's interesting to me too about this is a lot of times artists play with this idea of varying degrees of abstraction. And this is completely flip flopped of how they usually get away with it, which is that as things recede in the background, you get to abstract things more because you want to draw attention to the foreground. And so you've defined that thing more. And so this is so weird because the trees in the background are actually the ones that feel like defined in the way we would expect trees to be defined. And then the ones in the front are the ones that are just exploding and going nuts. 

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, that's a good point. And so 

Speaker 1 (25:02):
It's so weird because it's opposite and so it's so strange that as you get closer to the thing, you would think it to become clear in here, it's becoming less clear. 

Speaker 3 (25:15):
It's an interesting point, Russell, it it reminds me of when I've toured this piece and asked people what they see in it and when the first thing they say is a road, it makes me wonder. That's the least important part of 

Speaker 1 (25:32):
It. It's something they can grasp 

Speaker 3 (25:35):
On. It's something. Yeah, exactly. 

Speaker 1 (25:36):
It's like I know the word for that thing that is a row. I don't even know what I'm looking at 

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Over here, 

Speaker 1 (25:42):
So let's just go back there where I can focus. Yeah, it's like I remember during, I think the docent training, they were talking about the Rose Bush and I was like, the Rose Bush, what? Who cares about the Rose Bush? There is insanity going on. It would be like if somebody ran into the room naked and screaming and then you were just like, oh, did you notice that gum wrapper on the floor? No, I didn't. I noticed the naked screaming person like the Rose Bush. 

Speaker 2 (26:11):
You'll never look at this painting the same way. 

Speaker 1 (26:14):
And it's like right up front. 

Speaker 3 (26:17):
Well, let's talk about the highlight of the show then to close. 

Speaker 2 (26:22):
Wouldn't it be funny if we didn't talk about this painting? 

Speaker 1 (26:24):
I know, I know. It's like we've seen this one a couple 

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Times. Who cares? 

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah. So if you just on the wall had corner, you have undergrowth with two figures. 

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, we're just turning to our right and it's right there. 

Speaker 3 (26:38):
And the piece that we were just looking at and undergrowth with two figures were both done at the very end of Van Gogh's life and career. This is a two month period that if it was a microcosm of a macrocosm of his career, it sort of describes everything. He went through these periods of manic frenetic painting that he just turned the work out. And this period he did something like 200 pieces of art over the two month period, 

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Which 

Speaker 3 (27:11):
Is pretty incredible if you think about it. That just the sheer, and that's sketches and drawings and paintings as well. But that's kind of the whole thing. And this painting is also notable for its double square format, which is representative of a dozen or so paintings in the same format at the same period that he did. And double square, meaning it's rectilinear and it's twice the length of its height 

Speaker 3 (27:44):
And it creates a panoramic view into this forest of purple and blue trees and dark undergrowth in the back with this brightly lit scene of spring with daffodils and spring flowers in the foreground. So you have this panoramic view, but there's a conflict there with the vertical tree, the verticality of the trees. It's almost like there are prison bars that are holding the scene in, or you feel constrained somehow when you look at it with the horizon line being so far at the top of the painting, you're focused downward again, like the other pieces that we were looking at. And it creates, there's a tension there within the piece. 

Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, I think that's something that's pretty common with a lot of the paintings in this show. If you feel like you're looking at all these and wondering how is this different from a landscape or is this a landscape and what's common among a lot of 'em that the foreground dominates so much of the space in comparison to the background. And this is a good example of it, 

Speaker 1 (28:58):
This is one too, when we were talking about the very first painting and we talked about the figures in the painting, and he put the girl in there simply for scale. And I mean, maybe he actually doesn't really talk about the figures in this painting when he writes about it a whole lot. So we don't really know what his intentions were. But I mean, for me, it changes 

Speaker 2 (29:20):
This 

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Painting so much. It becomes very social suddenly by these two figures here. And it's so mysterious that you can go a million different ways. But it certainly doesn't seem like, oh, just for scale, it seems like very, I mean, it bears a lot of weight for me. 

Speaker 3 (29:39):
No, the figures are ghostly and they're also dead center right in the middle of the painting. So he's definitely saying something about that and it gives you a really, what is going on there? What are they doing in the woods? And it looks like they're dressed in, maybe there's a wedding ceremony that we're looking at or something like that. I don't know what is going on there. 

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Well, when we talked about the panoramic view, the wideness of this makes them feel extra isolated too, because it's such a wide scene and they occupy so little of it, it makes them feel extra alone in this world too. It feels like a very empty forest that they would be walking through. 

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Well, I think it makes it that much easier for you to place yourself in it and relate to it a little more with landscape paintings that are just the landscape and nothing else. And I'm thinking of Hudson River School. That's in Gallery two 16, is that right? 

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Sure, 

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah. I work here. I know the gallery numbers. 

Speaker 1 (30:44):
I think it's actually two 17, I think three, whatever, 

Speaker 2 (30:47):
It's in that area, you'll find 

Speaker 1 (30:50):
It. 

Speaker 2 (30:51):
But it's about celebrating the grandeur of nature unspoiled by mankind, which seems a little withholding to the person that's looking at it like, you can enjoy this, but you can't actually go and be here. But this kind of invites you to imagine what it'd be like to stand in the middle of this forest. You see people actually doing it. 

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah. I think it's always interesting also to talk about the flowers too. And just that we know now that he originally painted some of these, the flowers that are white were pink originally too. 

Speaker 1 (31:28):
And that he used a type of pink paint that was just not very, what's the word? Archival color? Fast. Color fast, yeah, there we go. And so it has since faded. And so if you look over to the right, there's a print on the wall that will show you sort of what it would look like if those particular flowers were pink. And it does change it a bit. It is interesting how these choices that were made, maybe just haphazardly not being super worried about the future have changed how we read a painting. I think that one of the things it does for me is without those pink flowers, it makes those trees seem extra otherworldly because the pink sort of relates to the purple of the trees and they feel like they are a part of this world. And here it gives this much more outer spacey vibe to those purple trees. 

Speaker 3 (32:27):
The trees contrast with the flowers also. There's a stillness to the trees and there's a stillness to the woods in the background. But with the brush strokes of the flowers, it looks like there might be some kind of wind or something going on that there's some climatic event that's happening there. But the trees have this stillness to them. 

Speaker 1 (32:51):
In my mind, I've always imagined these trees or the flowers are definitely blowing around. 

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Right? It looks like you can feel the wind when you're looking at some of the, 

Speaker 2 (33:01):
I imagine that that's why so many people love Vincent Van Gogh's paintings, is that it captures that quality without making it seem impossible to grasp with a really good painter that can capture movement. It makes you feel like you're nothing compared to someone that can do that. But this seems a little more, you see the human touch, I guess, and that it seems like someone found a really intuitive way to capture something that we've all experienced. And I feel like you can relate to 'em a little bit better knowing that maybe if I was a painter, I might've chose to capture movement in the same way. Well, thank you 

Speaker 1 (33:44):
So much for sharing this with us, Steven, and we hope you guys 

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Really enjoyed walking through the show with us. 

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking special exhibitions on view right now are Van Gogh into the Undergrowth Kentucky Renaissance, the Lexington Camera Club, and its community. 1954 to 1974, the book of only Enoch and the Jackleg Testament, part one, Jack and Eve, and employed a staff art exhibition. A program that might entrust you is fandom. On Saturday November 26th, fandom uses pop culture topics to discover new connections in the Art museum's collection. This month we'll be getting ready for the return of Sherlock, so prepare to use your deductive reasoning skills and solve some museum mysteries. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and also Snapchat. Our theme song is Efron Music by Becca Lao. If you liked our show, give us a nice review on iTunes and it helps others find our podcast. I'm Russell Iig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.