Van Gogh's Colors

Vincent Van Gogh is my all time favorite artist. Van Gogh’s use of color in his later paintings is very expressive. Van Gogh set out to use is bright colors to capture mood and emotion, rather than to capture it realistically. During Van Gogh’s time this was unheard of. Van Gogh first started his paintings using dark and gloomy earth colors such as raw umber, raw sienna, and olive green to capture the lives of the peasants, miners, and weavers whom he was living with. Later he moved to Paris and was introduced to the Impressionists. Van Gogh’s palette became vibrant with reds, yellows, blues, oranges, and greens. Typical colors in Van Gogh's palette included yellow ocher, chrome yellow and cadmium yellow, chrome orange, vermilion, Prussian blue, ultramarine, lead white and zinc white, emerald green, red lake, red ocher, raw sienna, and black. His style became very rapid with a sense of urgency in it. He used paint right from the tube in thick, graphic brush strokes. Van Gogh was influence with Japanese prints and he would paint dark outlines around objects and then fill them in with his thick colors. Van Gogh would use complementary colors because he knew that the complementary colors make each seem brighter. His choice of colors varied with his moods and occasionally he deliberately restricted his palette, such as with the sunflowers, which are almost entirely yellows.



“Indigo with terra sienna, Prussian blue with burnt sienna, really give much deeper tones than pure black itself. When I hear people say ‘there is no black in nature’, I sometimes think, ‘There is no real black in colors either’. However, you must beware of falling into the error of thinking that the colorists do not use black, for of course as soon as an element of blue, red, or yellow is mixed with black, it becomes a gray, namely, a dark, reddish, yellowish, or bluish gray.”
(Letter to Theo van Gogh, June 1884)