Visiting the National Gallery was one of my most anticipated stops during our entire time abroad in London. Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite painter of all time, not just because of his paintings but also because of his tragically beautiful life, and there were four of his paintings currently on display at the art museum, my favorite being ‘Van Gogh’s Chair.’ However, I will be talking about his most famous piece there, ‘Sunflowers’ in comparison to Rachel Ruysch’s ‘Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Marble Ledge’ because of how visually similar, yet strikingly different they are too one another.
Possibly due to my love of Doctor Who, specifically the episode revolving around Amelia Pond meeting Van Gogh and him falling in love with her, I find ‘Sunflowers’ to be a very beautiful painting. The vivid yellows and contrastingly dark colors make each flower ‘pop’ out of the painting, despite there being no outline to the flowers. I love the cartoony appearance of much of Van Gogh’s art and this is an excellent example of his craft. Ruysch’s painting (I will call it ‘Still Life of Flowers’ to shorten the title a little bit) is, objectively, a very similar painting, as it too is a portrait of flowers in a vase, but there is a much larger variety of colors that are, overall, much darker. Ruysch’s painting is much more realistic, but it is a lot harder for me to distinguish each flower from one another. The darker tones are much harder for me to see, because of my deuteranomaly color-blindness, and that makes the painting less appealing for me to look at. And shouldn’t art make me want to at least look at the painting? The middle of the ‘Still Life of Flowers’ is much brighter, however, and that is the part that draws my attention the most. But when looking at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, I am constantly observing new lines and brush strokes that I can’t really see in ‘Still Life of Flowers.’ Overall, they are both very beautiful paintings, and I would never be able to paint either one, but I simply prefer looking at Van Gogh’s as opposed to Ruysch’s. I am travelling to Amsterdam over our three-day weekend, and I WILL be going to the Van Gogh Museum to see the different versions of ‘Sunflowers’ and his various self-portraits (although I recently learned that my favorite painting of all time ‘Starry Night’ is in New York currently and I am fuming. Oh well…)
Theatre in London U of A 
Interesting observation about the brush strokes of Van Gogh being so much more interesting to look at than the other painting’s.
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