Paul Gauguin: Cats Paintings, One Summer with Gogh, and Tahiti

Paul Gauguin Paintings- a French painter who is well-known for the use of bold colors, exaggerated body proportions and stark contrasts. He paved the way to the Primitivism form of art from post-Impressionism era. Cats are seen in many of his works.

Vivid Impression of Peru in Childhood

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, but his family moved to Peru when he was a young child. His mother was an author and activist in early socialist movements and his journalist father died on the journey to South America.

To the age of six, Gauguin enjoyed a privileged upbringing, attended by nursemaids and servants. He retained a vivid memory of that period of his childhood which instilled indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life.

In 1871, Gauguin became a stockbroker after he returned to Paris and met Camille Pissarro who was a leading figure of Impressionism and be influenced by him largely. Gauguin began painting in his spare time. Next 11 years he was very successful at this job. With the crash of the Paris stock market in 1882, he started to pursue painting full time.

Cats in Paintings

One Summer with Van Gogh

Gauguin worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France in 1888. Both Gauguin and Van Gogh were searching for the place to inspire them to create new art.

Daubigny’s Garden: The Mystery of Gogh’s Gone Black Cat

Van Gogh was excited about his project to make a community for artists to start a new movement and sent letters to possible ones. Gogh rented a home he called the “Yellow House,” which would serve as a “Studio of the South” and invited Gauguin to join him there. Gauguin, at the time financially struggled, accepted the offer to come to Arles because Van Gogh’s brother Theo wrote him he would cover all the expenses including food, paints, travel expenses and monthly allowance in part.

Gauguin and Van Gogh respected each other and had been working well… for a while. However, their communal life ended by a tragic incident.

Van Gogh’s illness revealed itself: he began to hallucinate and suffered attacks in which he lost consciousness, and this time he used the knife and attacked Gauguin. Instead of hurting Gauguin, Van Gogh cut his lower part of his left ear. Later Van Gogh remembered nothing about it.

Gauguin left the Yellow House. It’s only been nine weeks in Arles for Gauguin.

Cloisonnism

Cloisonnism is a method of painting with flat areas of color and bold outlines, which reminded Dujardin of the Medieval cloisonné enameling technique. Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin’s work evolved towards Cloisonnism. Gauguin appreciated this style in his quest to express the essence of the objects in his art.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

Paul Gauguin Quotes (AZ QUOTES)

Paul Gauguin and Tahiti

Gauguin developed a new style that combined everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by so-called primitive arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia.

Gauguin’s first visit to Tahiti in 1891, changed his life forever. After returning to Paris, he came to settle down in Tahiti later. Gauguin’s avowed intent was to escape European civilization and everything that is artificial and conventional.

Various communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures influenced Gauguin’s view of life, he treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on the ultimate meaning of human existence. He expected to find the answers on how to live closer to nature while fulfilling the religious mind.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Paul Gauguin Quotes (AZ QUOTES)

Where do We Come From? What Are We Doing? Where are We Going

He wished, before dying, to paint one great, last testamentary picture, and summoning all his strength in a single burst of energy he painted this canvas his largest. This is the one, which depicts the human life cycle on a vast canvas. Finished with his western civilization and the conventional value, left his wife and children behind, trying to be closer to nature came to this paradise.

Gauguin died on May 3, 1903, at this isolated island home, alone. Had he found the answer and the ‘truth’ he’d been seeking for at last?

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Paul Gauguin (Proverbia)

Reference

BRITANNY AND ARLES (www.artic.edu)

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Also published on Medium.