Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Now I understand, what you tried to say to me and how you suffered for your sanity“—Don McLean, from the song Vincent
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (Tournesols) are the subject of two series of paintings that the artist produced. The earlier series was produced in Paris during 1887 and depicts the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set, executed a year later in Arles, shows bouquets of sunflowers in a vase. In the artist’s mind both sets were linked to the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Parisian versions of the paintings for his own collection.
Eight months later, van Gogh hoped to welcome and impress Gauguin again with Sunflowers, that are now part of the painted Décoration for the Yellow House he prepared for the guestroom of his home in Arles, where Gauguin was planning on staying. After Gauguin’s departure, van Gogh imagined the two major versions as wings of the Berceuse Triptych, and finally he included them in his Les XX in Bruxelles exhibit
How I Made this Shot: The above image was not a copy of either of van Gogh’s series and was shot in a large field of sunflowers near Brighton, Colorado. The camera used was a Canon EOS 1D Mark IIN with my favorite, at the time, EF 28-105mm lens (at 73mm.) As I write this, you can pick up a copy of this wonderfully useful lens here. Exposure was 1/200 sec at f/7.1 and ISO 200 with edge effects added from Analog Efex Pro.
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