Stuart Hall students immersed in the art & spirituality of Van Gogh

Above: Vincent Van Gogh’s changing treatment of sunflowers can be seen in two series of paintings executed in different years and in different cities. (Photo above courtesy of Stuart Hall School for Boys; others by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald)
 
By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

The influence of setting on Vincent Van Gogh’s art can be seen in the dramatic changes to his paintings of sunflowers completed in two different years.

In 1887, while living in the big and sometimes dreary city of Paris, Van Gogh painted a somber series of dead sunflowers lying on a table, their petals withered and their undersides thick with seeds.

Just one year later, having relocated to the coastal city of Arles in the sunny South of France, Van Gogh’s sunflowers burst with life and color in their earthenware vases.

The shift in Van Gogh’s treatment of the sunflower is just one of the tidbits Lower School students at Stuart Hall learned of during a two-week unit on the artist completed earlier this month. The religion and art departments at Stuart Hall School for Boys created a cross-curricular opportunity in which first through fourth graders studied Van Gogh’s spiritual journey and its impact on his art.

“The kids were really interested in the differences between the sunflowers,” said Kirsten Anderson, who guided the art portion of the collaboration as Stuart Hall’s art teacher.

“Most of the communication that we have from Van Gogh are in letters he wrote to his brother Theo; he wrote about how sunflowers were special to him, because he saw them as expressions of gratitude,” Anderson said. “He gave some of his sunflower paintings to (fellow artist and friend) Paul Gaugin, and Gaugin, in return, painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers, which I think was quite lovely!”
Chose paint over food

Anderson showed her art students other ways Van Gogh’s style and subjects had evolved over his lifetime. For example, many of Van Gogh’s early works were bleak charcoal portraits of rural workers going through hardships – at a time “most artists of his time were focusing more on affluence and showing people of importance,” Anderson said. His artistic output became more colorful after he discovered vivid scenes of Japanese life in newspapers and magazines.

The boys also learned about the 19th-century art movements of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh is considered to be part of the latter group), and added the term “still life” to their vocabulary (paintings or drawings of an arrangement of objects that typically include fruit, flowers or other everyday items).

As a culminating project in art class, Anderson challenged her students to create their own sunflower paintings using the method Van Gogh himself used: adding flour to thicken their paint and then using palette knives to apply large lashings of this paint to create texture.

“(Van Gogh) spent more money on paint than food,” shared third grader Peter Pastorek, as his sunflower painting came to life. Anderson also showed students how their palette knives could be used to score, scrape and create divots in the paint, something particularly useful in creating the rough brown center of their sunflowers.

“When you use a palette knife, it’s harder to move the paint around,” observed third grader Jude Crawford. “When you use a brush, you can get more detail in.”
 
Tortured, but faith-filled

In their religion classes with teacher Jeannette Dufrene, the students learned that Van Gogh was an eccentric, brilliant and misunderstood artist who had a profound Christian upbringing. His father, a missionary to miners in Belgium who lived in extremely poor conditions, exposed Van Gogh to how faith sustained them.

At age 25, Van Gogh moved to Amsterdam to become a minister of religion, following in his father’s footsteps and determined to establish himself as a lay preacher to the working class. He said his goal was to be “a friend of the poor like Jesus was,” and his artwork reflected that, Dufrene said.

“He gave away his money and clothes to the miners, refused the lodgings of a miner family and slept crouched in a hovel,” Dufrene said. “He even refused the luxury of soap; people saw him shirtless, soot-faced, skinny and famished.”

After a three-month trial period at a school for evangelists, Van Gogh had his admission rejected.


“As a young man, Van Gogh struggled with his speech and was not known to be a sociable person,” Dufrene said. “However, his gifts poured out through his art. He had panic attacks and mental breakdowns, but he never stopped looking for God! He never stopped preaching; he only changed how he preached. He began to share God’s love through his art.”

The artist’s famous “Sunflower” paintings also can be studied for their links to Creation and the relationship between God and the human soul,” Dufrene said.

“We looked at the relationship between the sun and the sunflowers – how the sun feeds life to the sunflowers, how the sunflowers reach their full growth potential with the sun, how they respond to the sun and seek its light almost instinctively,” she said.

Van Gogh’s Christian faith also is visible in his painted scenes of two parables – The Good Samaritan and The Sower – as well as in his depictions of “The Raising of Lazarus” and “La Pieta,” the latter picturing Mary holding the body of her son after the crucifixion. Students read the original texts of each story together in class.

Dufrene left her students with several profound observations by Van Gogh, who died in 1890 at age 47:

• “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

• “I am still far from what I want to be, but with God’s help, I shall succeed.”

• “God sends us pieces of art so that we may see ourselves in them.”

• “Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh. He makes men instead of statues.”

[email protected]

Pictured below: As an added project in art class, Stuart Hall’s second graders painted their own versions of Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous painting – his 1889 masterpiece entitled “The Starry Night.”