BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...
The
script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled
for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.
Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (2/2)
Thankfully I have rarely suffered from
hangovers, so I woke up at 9am, leaving Dorota to sleep it off a bit more and
went and bought myself some clothes, seeing as we didn't have our washing
machine plumbed in yet back in Warsaw, and I hadn't got around to going to launderette,
I had to buy my clothes for the trip ahead. And of course my winter clothes
were in the wrong city anyway, so I bought the cheapest hat and gloves that
H&M had to offer.
When we finally assemble all our stuff from the
various studios, friends and relatives I'll probably realise we need to
re-renovate our place with more storage. My itinerant life has been for three
years, prior to that I moved only twice in a decade; Vincent was itinerant his
whole adult life. But when he left a place it was often very abruptly, leaving
his stuff behind, with a retinue of angry creditors making a return unlikely.
For sure there were scores of early Van Gogh drawings and paintings that were
left behind, and probably broken up and sold for wood by the creditors he fled
from… amazing to think if they had just left it in their attics their children
would have become multi-millionaires! This is to add to the Van Goghs destroyed
in wars; stolen; and the one- a portrait of Madame Ginoux that Vincent set out
from the St Remy Asylum on day release to give to her, but when he was found in
the streets of Arles, dazed and confused, he was without the painting. Just
imagine unearthing one of these after 125 years!! The nearest I have heard to
something like this is the Finnish Department of Foreign Affairs. One of their
junior employees in the French embassy was tasked with going out and buying
some art, he came back with two Van Goghs, which appalled his conservative
superiors, so he got demoted, or fired, or moved, and the two paintings sat in
the attic of the Finnish embassy for 30 years, until someone realised they had
two insanely valuable paintings rudely stacked among bric a brac.
Acceptably clad in clean warm clothes we
struck out into the white grey gloom for Holland. Obviously Liege didn't want
us to go, either that or I was over estimating my morning lucidity as we
managed to re-enter the city twice before finally striking out on a long
straight white road instead of the motorway (which was clogged with standstill
traffic). The road was virtually empty, dissecting barren white fields. It was
a relief to enter a forest, where all the branches bent ominously under piles
of fresh wet snow. We passed Neunen, but decided that another standstill
motorway was sufficient to deter us from seeing the place where Vincent spent
more time than any other during his years as a painter, and the only place he
didn't leave abruptly. This was where his ageing father had been sent, to
preside over a small protestant community in an overwhelmingly Catholic
village. His father and the parsonage were at the centre of the community, but
this was disrupted by the arrival of the eldest son, who by now was an avowed
atheist; who insisted in dressing in peasant clothes; and who would accost
anyone he saw to come and model for him. At this time he worked furiously to
master drawing, but also developed as a painter, painting what is heralded as
his first masterpiece: The Potato Eaters. While he felt this was a breakthru,
and he sent copies of it to many people who he wanted to impress, many of who
had abandoned him, and in whose eyes he longed to be redeemed. But no one
seemed to see what he saw, his friend van Rappard, put it:
"Why do you see and treat everything so
superficially? How far from true is that coquettish little hand of the woman in
the background… And why isn't that man to the right allowed to have a knee, a
belly and lungs? Or are they located in his back? And why must his arm be a
yard too short? And why must he do without one half of his nose? And why must
that woman on the left have some sort of little tobacco-pipe stem with little
cube at the end for a nose?"
The friendship was crushed, as many of
Vincent's friendships with other artists were, by bitter invective. van Rappard
has a point, but as Vincent retorted, he also misses the point. And van
Rappard's work is now a footnote in art history, mentioned only for his
interaction with Vincent. Rappard was not the only one to scorn The Potato Eaters;
his brother Theo rallied an array of criticism from himself, backed up by other
artists and dealers in Paris. Wounded, but still belligerent Vincent conceded
his figures were crude, but said that it had spirit and a life that would shine
through:
"I should be in despair if my figures
were good rather…everything depends on how much life and passion an artist is
able to express."
On Sunday we would get to see this at the
Van Gogh Museum but first we had to find out what was at the Hague. I was still
getting stick for being stubborn and making us go to the Hague when there was
only one van Gogh there. We arrived in the Hague to find the Maritshaus museum
…. closed for renovation!!! What is going on - the van Gogh Museum, the Rijks
Museum Maritshaus, all at the same time? What is so special about 2013 that
they all need to be re-vamped for, or maybe the staff just want to party before
the end of the world? Anyway precious museum time was being lost: did you know
that museums in Holland close at 5pm (!?) as someone who has mainly visited art
museums in London and New York this seemed seriously anti-social, and for the
whole trip we felt like we were breaking land speed records to make it in time
for closing. So onto Gementemuseum, with a time limit of 30 minutes. We went
straight to see the three Rembrandts. One of his early works, that made him
famous, 'Anatomy lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp', was flanked by two paintings
from three decades later, towards the end of his career, 'Homer' and 'Two
Negroes'. To be honest I wouldn't have given Anatomy Lesson a second glance if
Dorota hadn't told me it was so famous, but even with my walking painting encyclopedia
next to me, I had trouble studying it… when the other two are just so
fascinating - the lighting in these and the way it is painted is
impressionistic, counter to the realism of the earlier work, both early and
late work have amazing lighting, but the later ones are dark, mysterious:
something you can get lost in. There was no time to dwell on anything else; we
scoured the rooms in search of the sole Hague van Gogh. Embarrassingly we both
walked right past it, and had to have it pointed out to us: 'Garden At Arles',
1888.
My heart sank; I had siphoned time away from
museums with 100's of van Goghs for this.... It seemed a bit of a mess, not one
of his great paintings, not one of the great Arles landscapes. I walked away
from the picture, and turned to give it one last look… and from a distance it
looked totally different. I was standing on the right of it facing it, at 10
metres away, and the painting… came alive. The path drew me in, the perspective
was deep and intriguing, the staccato multicoloured brush strokes that seemed unnecessary
up close cohered to give you the feeling of an over-flowing garden shimmering
under intense summer sunshine. It brought a smile to my face. One thing I
couldn't bear to, or afford to buy, was new winter boots, as I bought a very
nice pair last year, so I had been walking around for the whole trip with my
feet soaking in my summer trainers, and here- looking at this- I felt like I
could walk down the path and be enveloped by cicadas and Mediterranean heat.
As I am writing this, I am looking again at
the painting on line: http://www.
A minute past our curfew, we raced back to
our illegally parked car and drove furiously to Rotterdam under a glorious
heavy orange sun, calling ahead to the museum to check they wouldn't close on
us. When we arrived half an hour before closing they kindly decided not to
charge us, and directed us to the van Gogh's. After my depth revelation we
looked at the decidedly flat, portrait of Armand Roulin. And I was rather disappointed
that it was the three quarter profile Armand, rather than the head on one of
him in his yellow suit that we use in the Concept trailer. I am also influenced
by the fact that I love our Amand Roulin character in the film; he will be the
narrator for our film sequence that we are planning to use for Kickstarter-
'The Ear'. So I left Dorota to studying it carefully and moved on to the next
ones.
They had poplars near Nuenen, a painting I
liked very much, mainly because I thought it was dramatically useful for the
film.
 |
| (source: wikipedia.org) |
It is from 1885, and I wondered from when in 1885, whether it was after
his father's death in March of that year. Centre of the picture is the church
spire in black silhouette, and under it in the foreground two women in black,
and of to the side of them a man in peasant blue overalls, Vincent's default
clothing at the time, who is holding some unidentifiable white stick in his hand.
And it is an avenue of poplars, a tree that signifies loneliness, artisticness,
and lacking in confidence... Could it be symoblising that he has lost his way
in the wake of his father's death, and the black figure is mother and sister
who turned their back on him, and all is dominated by the dead pastor, in the
form of the silhouetted spire at the heart of the picture? Maybe the
unidentified white is a blind man stick- symbolising Vincent's blindness. I
have to check the date of the painting, and also whether I can find any
references in his letters to the paintings, or to poplars, and check when the
white cane first started to be used. Whether I am finding symbolism that isn't
there, this painting has great dramatic potential for Vincent's departure from
Nuenen in the film; and the fact is that most of Vincent's subjects were highly
symbolic and much related back to his family, his mother's love of nature, and
his father's religious teaching.
1885 was a key year for Vincent. On the one
hand he was super prolific, and had the breakthru of the Potato Eaters, on the
other hand his relations with his family deteriorated disastrously, and the
sudden death of his father made things worse, as his mother and sisters in part
blamed him for the death of his father. Vincent had terrible and violent rows
with his aged father, and to a lesser extent with his mother and sisters. He
desperately wanted their love, as you can see from his letters when they are
apart, but in these two years he railed against the views and authority of his
ageing father- openly drinking, whoring, declaring his atheism, trying to tear
down his father's world view- even as his father was bemusedly trying to
understand and accept his son's chosen vocation, one that produced no money,
just sucked it out of the family at an alarming rate. After his death he was
hounded out of home by his sister and mother, and… would never return home or
see them again. Once again he was leaving a place under a cloud, but not just
any place, he was leaving the family that he so wanted to be loved by, for
good. But... he was leaving as a painter; the die was cast.
The one painting where there can be no doubt
of its symbolic meaning, painted just after his father's death, is Still life
with a Bible. This would be a treat for the following day.
Having lost myself in thoughts on Poplars
near Nuenen, we then used the final minutes to scout around the gallery. I was
struck by the work of the Hague School, especially a large painting by Anton
Mauve, the star of the Hague school, who was an uncle to Vincent by marriage,
and who can be credited as the man who persuaded Vincent to paint. Until his
apprenticeship to Mauve, Vincent was completely set on being an illustrator.
Inevitably they had a seismic falling out, but Van Gogh always thereafter
sought Mauve's approval, which was never forthcoming. When Mauve died Vincent
sent him 'Peach tree in blossom' to his widow, and Mauve's granddaughter, three
decades later, sold this for a hundred times more than the highest selling of
her grandfather's paintings. I only knew Mauve through his role in Vincent's
story, I had never seen his work, so I was surprised to be very struck by his
paintings. While he might have been chained to the dealer system, his paintings
were often pre-sold by Tersteeg (Vincent's nemesis), who harried him for as
many paintings as possible, churning them out for the American market, he is
someone with sensitivity and passion for his work. The Hague school duly
visited, we had 30 seconds to admire Pieter Bruegel's the tower of Babel. Too
short, a great affecting image whether on a postcard or on the Internet; it was
a complete treat to see the actual painting, even for under a minute. Not for
the first or last time on the trip we were escorted from the premises!!!
_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg) |
| (source: wikipedia.org) |
by Hugh Welchman
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