Museum Visit

For my virtual museum visit, I checked out Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France. I chose this museum because the focus of the museum is paintings done by distinguished artists like Van Gogh. I find a lot of inspiration in paintings because a person has to put whatever they saw in real life onto paper or canvas. So for my online tour, I was able to click around and look at some paintings as if I were there. A large portion of the collection is online as photographs which made it easier to look at. An artist I kept looking at (and who inspired most of my photographs) was Vincent Van Gogh. His art is so beautiful and simplistic yet unrecreatable. I know he is a popular artist and it is easy to understand why. I also looked through other paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, and more. While they were all by different artists, the time period for the paintings started in the 1800’s and ended in the early 1900’s and displayed different focuses. There were many still lifes, people going about their daily routine, and portraits. This visit inspired me to recreate modern versions of certain pieces. They are not exact replicas but instead modern photographs that I could see fitting into the storyline of the paintings there. I made a simple version of Cézanne’s Still Life with a Kettle on my table in my kitchen with objects that resembled what he painted. I took a photo of my own bedroom to mirror Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Aries (by himself of course) and increased the vibrancy a bit to copy the bright colors in his painting. I also mimicked Van Gogh’s Fritillaries in a Copper Vase and Dr. Paul Gachet (a sad looking man that i put myself in place of talking on the phone). For my last photo, I was inspired by various artists (like Caillebotte) who painted people working and living their lives. So I went outside and took a picture of my dad working. He was mixing concrete and we were able to get a pretty cool shot! Overall, I really enjoyed looking at these paintings that showed simplicity and happiness in their own ways.