008. Paul Gauguin: Le Christ Jaune (The Yellow Christ)

My copy of The Yellow Christ

Yellow Christ 92.07 x 73.34 cm
Currently on display at Albright-Knox, New York, USA.

 Le Christ jaune by Paul Gauguin

The Yellow Christ depicts the crucifixion in a rural village of Pont-Aven in Breton. At his feet, women in national dress prey. This painting is considered an apogee of Symbolism and if you google for interpretations or the meaning behind this painting - boy is there a pile of crap out there.

To add to that pile; I like this painting as it talks to the child in me 'God sent his son to Earth and he comes in a variety of different colours!'-  Awesome.

From a compositional and artistic point, copying this should of had been great for someone learning to paint. It can be divided into six sections, there is a nice tonal shift down in colours from top to bottom, bold black lines used to outline and a sensible palette. I, however, managed to cock it up.

High contrast background near the start

Firstly, When I started this painting I was playing around with using a high contrast background instead of white. i.e. Identifying the main colour in the painting and then looking for the opposite on the colour wheel. I had read that this can help with eye coordination and I have to concur, but, and it is a big but, it is a false sense of security. I noticed as more and more of the pinkish background disappeared beneath the paint, I lost my point of references. As a result, Jesus's pants got bigger and bigger.

Yellow Jesus and big pants, stolen along with the Big Daisies and The Fallen Madonna with the big boobies

Second cock-up; I had a small windfall from my day job and decided to splash out on not just a few more paints, but lots of new paints. Up until now I only had one Yellow, now I had six and the same went for reds, blues, etc. In my excitement to try them out, they were all thrown onto the canvas. Especially a new favourite, Paynes Grey. This doubled my work as I later had to repaint over many areas to bring it back under control and regain some sense of balance. 

Of note however from this frantic mixing; I did discover a nice brown which is used on the cross in the final picture; It was a mix of:

Vermillion 

Cobalt Blue

Cadmium Yellow

I’ve mentioned before about erring on the side of caution when seeing green in old paintings and was very cautious about using it to shade Jesus. I am still playing catch up writing this blog, but a few weeks after finishing the painting. I picked up for the bargain price of 16p a book edited by Waldermar Janusxczak called ‘Techniques of the world's great painters’. It has a section on Gaugain. and it mentions his use of green which was comforting to read.

This is definitely not the last Gaugain in my 100 challenge, not only do I feel the need to avenge the technical cockups in copying this, I believe there is a lot to be learnt from his paintings.