National Gallery

Yesterday we went to the National Gallery, honestly I have realized that I really don’t like going to any kind of museum. I just don’t have the attention span and I don’t want to stand there all day and analyze each and every picture I find that they all start to look the same after a while so I just get really bored. Also, there are too many people in too small of a space trying to look at the same things so it is really cramped and really hard to see everything and really hard to take pictures. So yesterday it was very hard for me to find things to compare and contrast for this assignment.

However, I did find two paintings that I really liked and wanted to write about. The first one was the chair painted by Vincent Van Gogh and the second one was the painting of the sunflowers coincidently painted by . . . you guessed it, Vincent Van Gogh! I didn’t intentionally try to pick two paintings by the same artist, but as I was going through the museum and looking at all the art those were the two paintings that I saw that stood out and really caught my attention. I think it’s because they are very colorful paintings and they stand out from all the other paintings because I noticed that a lot of the paintings that I did see had a lot of dark and neutral colors like brown, black, white, tan, with a little bit of color mixed in if someone had a colorful piece of clothing on. 

Some of the similarities that I noticed in the two paintings were of course they were painted by the same person so somewhere in the painting they had the name Vincent written in black ink so that people would know that I was painted by him and that it was his original work, I also noticed that each painting had a lot of yellow in it I’m not sure if he did that on purpose but I liked how they kind of resembled each other in that way even though they are two different paintings probably painted at different times. A difference that I noticed between the two paintings are that obviously they are two different paintings with two different meanings so both tell us two different stories and when you are looking at them you can kind of make up a story for them which I think is interesting. We probably don’t know the context or thoughts behind the paintings, but it’s kind of interesting to think about how he was inspired to paint these, like did he just paint a chair in his house or did buy sunflowers just to paint them or could he have bought them for someone and just ended up painting them instead. You can come up with so many theories.

Overall, I liked the paintings that I saw, but I don’t feel that need to go back again and I don’t foresee me going to many more museums in my life. It was a good experience and I’m glad that I got to see some art that I may have never been able to see before, but art museums are just not my thing.