Beauty of a Tormented Mind Even before going to the Norton Simon Museum, I already knew what artist I was going to write about; the only thing I needed was a specific work of art. On November thirteen, I went to the museum and I found a painting that really appealed my eye. The work of art that I liked most was Winter (The Vicarage Garden under Snow) created by Vincent van Gogh. The beautiful painting was probably created January 1885. The medium of van Gogh’s painting is oil. The artwork hangs stunningly on the museum wall and is fifty eight by eighty centimeters; the movement is called Post-Impressionism. Winter (The Vicarage Garden under Snow) is an average size painting and it depicts a scene of a man shoveling snow in the garden. The man is positioned to the right and underneath the center of the painting. He is wearing dark clothing, they look very raggedy and old; in his hands he has a shovel. The man’s expression, to me, looks very sad and exhausted. Around the shoveling man, snow covers the ground and there are trees without leaves. The snow is covering all of the garden and it looks dirty, the snow is not all white; there are flakes of brown on the snow, which looks similarly to dirt. In the garden there are several scrawny, tall trees; they obviously have no leaves due to the fact that it is sometime in the winter. Besides the man, a few feet behind, there is a plant with light orange flowers on it. This plant is the only living thing there besides the man. There are other plants, in the left middle, but I’m not completely sure they are plants; even if they are plants they look dead and weird. Behind the shoveling man and the dark branchy trees, there is a brown wall running behind them and it has a small entrance to the garden. The skies take up the upper half of the painting, and they are dark and gloomy; the sky has a feeling of coldness, it makes the viewer not want to be there. Who wants to be outside in that weather? The sky is basically saying stay indoors, where it is nice and warm. This work of art is not well known and it is very beautiful. This work of art uses a variety of lines. The wall behind the man and trees is the horizontal line. Most of the trees that are in the front have vertical lines. The branches of the front trees have organic shapes. Those branches are not like regular shapes, they are all unique. The trees are also representational because they look like trees but they are not exact images of trees. In the painting there is actual texture. Mostly the whole painting is done with visible amounts of paint added, which is known as impasto. The color palette used in the painting is an open palette because it uses four or more colors; the only colors are green, blue, brown, orange, yellow, and white. There are in between colors but those are just the colors at different levels of hue, and value. This painting does use space, it uses separation of planes. The trees in the front, back, and middle help create that effect. There is visual weight, and it is pretty balanced but I feel like the shoveling man makes the right side a little bit heavier. The artwork has no symmetry, so it is referred to as asymmetry. This piece of art has unity, in which there are many trees that look similar but at the same time has variety because not all the trees are the same. The main focus point in the work of art is the man who is shoveling. He is placed near the center and our eye goes immediately to him. The way I interpret Winter (The Vicarage Garden under Snow), by van Gogh, is by a working man having to shovel snow in the winter on a really bad day. He has to do a job that no one really appreciates, and his job requires him to work on bad weather. From what the man is wearing, he is most likely an unwealthy man. This scene is of a working class man doing his work and I think Vincent van Gogh painted this so other people could see how it is like to be a working man; it
