Let's Talk Art Loving Vincent

Let’s Talk Art Loving Vincent - the world's first fully painted feature film! © by Catherine Sarrazin This is Catherine Sarrazin and this week on ‘Let’s talk Art’ we’ll visit an exhibition on the silver screen with the feature film Loving Vincent, an animation first of the kind compiling thousands of frames all hand-painted. This is the work and idea of director Dorota Kobiela and co-director Hugh Welchman as well as 80 painters hired worldwide to create the imagined story of Van Gogh’s last days. The result is astonishing as Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and characters come to life. The story starts just after the painter’s death, with the presence of a letter written by Van Gogh and addressed to his brother Theo. The letter came back so the head postman of St Martin, a close friend of the painter, sends his own son on an errand to hand in the letter to its recipient, but also to investigate Van Gogh’s sudden and mysterious death. What follows is an intriguing journey undertaken by Armand Roulin, the postman’s son, to the small country town of Auvers in the summer of 1890. Many of the characters who appear all along the way are well-known from Van Gogh’s paintings – the postman Joseph Roulin and his son, Dr Gachet and his daughter Marguerite,’The Girl in White’, the innkeeper Adeline Ravoux, and the idiot of the village that van Gogh painted with a cornflower. Every single frame is a painting on canvas. The film opens with The Starry Night which took no less than six hours to create and, on average; a 10-second shooting took 20 weeks to paint. The live action was filmed in London on a green screen and then sent to Gdansk in Poland to turn each frame into a painting. Each new frame and character introduced in the film starts with a van Gogh painting and then the characters evolve from their position in the original painting and move around the setting. The black and white sequences however are mainly inspired by old photographs of the different places and are used here as flashbacks. The casting was carefully carried out to find actors who resembled the characters on canvas. Douglas Booth plays the son and Chris O’Dowd the postman. Saoirse Ronn is the doctor’s daughter and Jerome Flynn plays Dr Gachet. While 94 van Gogh paintings could be used as they were to introduce a new scene, 40 had to be reimagined or adapted to the screen as they were not of the same size, the painting ‘Marguerite Gachet at the Piano’ had to be extended on both sides to show more of the room she was in and the famous painting ‘Café Terrace at Night’ received a vertical pan in order to avoid any extension. Each frame with the added characters was painted over, creating in the end more than 65 000 frames in oil paint. After finishing the painting of each frame, animators would paint the next frame onto the same canvas. Hence only 1000 painted frames survived. An exhibition of 200 paintings created for the film is currently being put together, and the other paintings are being sold online. The film took 7 years to finish and is a real tribute to van Gogh’s art, but also a work of art in itself. .

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