Dali House

Vincent returned to the yellow house yesterday and immediately began painting again — a self-portrait, complete with the big bandage around his head, and a picture of Felix Rey, his doctor.

Vincent’s brother, Théo, took him today to see Rev Frédéric Salles, the Protestant pastor, and then got the train back to Paris, taking Gauguin with him.

Above, Southern France, showing Van Gogh’s destinations beyond Arles and, ultimately, Saint-Rémy.

Unless you really want to talk about Jackson Pollock some more, we don’t do “fight club” at Dali House — our boys are mostly the lovin’ type. Some of them get carried away with it, like JW “Bosom Buddy” Godward and Louis “The Ladies’ Man” Eilshemius, and this curious little Casanova here, Félicien Rops.

Though he wrestled with inner conflicts, Rops was gleeful in celebrating the female, and had as his resolute motto “No desire to be otherwise”.

His reputation precedes him, quite a long distance actually, from the pages of history: He’s been dead 110 years and people are still keen as hell to hear about his adventures.

“He never drew the nude but, rather, like Manet in ‘Olympia’, naked women,” Sotheby’s said enigmatically in its catalogue notes for last month’s European paintings sale in London, at which it was flogging the Rops “masterpiece” shown above — “Pornokrates”, also known as “Woman with a Pig” — for up to £350,000 … or more! (It’s “only” watercolour and pastel.)

Whatever term you use for bare flesh, Rops was a connoisseur, a nighthawking whirlwind of sketches and etches, many bags full. “I am Jack the Ripper!” he exclaimed of his own prolific output.

Ah, but he did rip well. Ensor, Munch, Beardsley and even Rodin thought he was the black cat’s meow and cheered every midnight howl from the leading devil of “Dark Symbolism”. Deliberately shocking to the lecherous edge of perversity, he was actually quite refined and a barrel of laughs, if occasionally struck by melancholy at the lash of women’s whimsy.

“The love of women, like Pandora’s Box,” he wrote, “contains all the grief of life, but they are enveloped in such luminous golden spangles, they are so brilliantly coloured and have such a perfume, that it is never necessary to repent for having opened it.”

Félicien Rops (1833-98) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of an industrialist. Soon enough the Catholic Church surgically implanted the sacramental coal in his heart that spoils all Catholics’ fun for the rest of their lives. See the rest.

“Ladies of Arles — Reminiscence of the Garden at Etten”

One of Vincent’s favourite places to paint is the old Roman cemetery, the Nécropole des Alyscamps. He and Gauguin go there all the time now. The name comes from Elisii Campi — Elysian Fields. The Romans made it their burial ground beyond the city limits, as was their custom.

It used to be quite famous. Wealthy people from all over Europe were interred there for nearly 1,500 years, until they moved St Trophime’s body to St Etienne in the 12th century, and then no one really cared to rest there any longer. He’d been
the first bishop of Arles, in the third century, and they say Jesus was at his funeral!

The graves decayed, but you can still see sarcophagi and monuments, some quite elaborate, along the tree-lined walkway leading up to the St Honorat Church.

Two portraits from November 1888: Van Gogh did likenesses of all of the Roulin clan, who became a second family for him in Arles — father Joseph, a postman, mother Augustine, baby daughter Marcelle and sons Camille and (shown here) 17-year-old Armand.

“L’Arlesienne — Madame Ginoux with Books”

Marie Ginoux was the proprietress of the Café de la Gare on nearby Place Lamartine, and posed for both Vincent and Gauguin at the Yellow House in early November.

Seattle-based artist and animator Gina Miller manages to bring a new dimension to a very well-known painting on her website Nanogirl and blog Maxanimation with a video re-recreation of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” using 2D and 3D components and set gloriously to a Tchaikovsky waltz.

Gina calls it a “work-in-process animation”, a gradual assembly and then dissection of the painting. She has links for downloads in different video formats and to the YouTube post.

“I really feel like I know it intimately, where every house is, every bush, almost as if it is now a physical place in my memory,” Gina writes. “I’ve put the painting back on the wall, and when I look at it now, I feel like I’ve truly been there. As a child I read about Van Gogh in books at the local library and the impressionism brushstrokes seemed to be creating a motion effect, quite a fitting project for a future animator.”

Even more intriguing is her “Talking Mona Lisa”, right down to a demure blush in the cheeks. It’s another of many graphics and videos viewable at either of the two sites by a very talented (and busy!) upcoming artist worth watching. Settle in for a Nanogirl Film Festival.

“I use animation programs to create my work, and Photoshop,” she tells me. “Although the ‘Starry Night’ animation was much more organic in nature, excluding the houses I actually painted all of the parts inside of Photoshop.

“I very much enjoyed working on ‘Starry Night’ as it came full circle with my childhood interest in the work. There is an extra sense of energy when you are creating and connecting with not only some one else’s work that you have admired, but also with your own sense of nostalgia. This made it a much more meaningful and pleasurable experience.

“I also felt sort of like an archaeologist in the sense that I felt such exploration and discovery, because I had to really examine the work from a different perspective, take it apart, reproduce the parts, and put it back together again. I got to know it so well that I almost felt like I became a part of the painting in this way!”