Van Gogh and I

All kind of plans…

Posted on 16/01/2015 | 1 comment

From the time I still had plans…

For instance, since human clients for portraits seems to be rare these days, I plan to do some superb dog portraits (knowing how much people love their pets, a good portrait should bring me tons of cash…) Here are some models I plan to paint the next days… waiting for humans (Godot included)…

I also plan to start a project with teenagers (12 to 17) teaching them to draw portraits of themselves, if the project will be approved…

But mainly, I plan to draw portraits at the Marche de la Gare, a picturesque spot in Sherbrooke with plenty of interesting people walking by (mostly on rolling skates, jogging, on bykes and parading their pure breed dogs… no cats to be seen, yet…) Plenty of couples and beautiful young girls, children and grandparents… A lot of clients of the Orford Express Train, too… Not a moment of boredom… I even took…

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Posted in Painting

I Am Too Old For This Shit

Posted on 30/12/2014 | 2 comments

I’m even more old for this shit…:)

Van Gogh and I

La Bohème, la vie d’artiste, for the moment I will set that aside. As you can read in my title, I really am too old for this shit… 20 years older than Vincent at the moment of his death. I’ve tried and will still try to go on and finish what I can, I know this is just a phase and maybe, one day, if I’ll live, the nostalgia of an artist life, the urge to draw and to paint could come back with a vengeance. But for now, I will just stay (literally) on my arse 8 h per day, helping clients of Chatr to Talk Happy… It will pay the bills…

What can I do? No Mecena offered to do for me what Theo did for Vincent or Ambroise Vollard for Gauguin…

Painting, art, literature, will still be with me and I’ll even try to write a blog…

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Posted in ART, Caricature, DAnu, Drawing, Family, Ion Vincent Danu, Life, News, Painting, Photography, Portrait, Sketch, Vincent Van Gogh

Tagged Caricature, Danu, Ion Vincent Danu, jester, Lac des Nations, le caricaturiste en Estrie, Life, portrait, Sherbrooke, street entertainer, vie

The Jester DAnu…

Posted on 21/12/2014 | Leave a comment

Still true, that one, I’m still somewhat of a jester…a clown…

Van Gogh and I

Summer is a wonderful time here, in Quebec (in other parts of the world I suppose is the same but given the long, long winter, when the summer comes, man! are we “Quebecois” glad!)

Everybody is wearing shorts and sandals – even if sometimes the temperatures are not that warm – and if you work as a portrayer-jester (as I do, in the summertime – Remember? Janis Joplin’s “Summertime”? and Ella Fitzgerald’s?) you’ll see a lot of people jogging, walking, skating, bycicling around the Lac of Nations…

Yesterday I was trying to make a portrait or two (you can see what I did right here) and my friend Raymond and his Zoo en Folies (4 parrots) came along… and then also Stephane, the accordionist (the one who’s playing amelie poulin’s musical theme and other «Paris-Montmartre» tunes … Some tourists and some pickpockets and a hill or two (maybe a cathedral…

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Homage to Vincent

Posted on 16/12/2014 | 2 comments

A dear friend of mine saw a reproduction of the Almond Blossom that she liked in a photo of my room and I did a “copy” of it (copy between ” ” since I’m not capable of 100 % copying another painting). I don’t know if I did a good job, I hope, and I let you be the judges of that:

My variant – as an homage and trying to learn his technique – of Vincent’s Almond Blossom

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Posted in ART, DAnu, Ion Vincent Danu, News, Painting, Vincent Van Gogh

Tagged Almond Blossom, Branches d'amandier, Danu, Ion Vincent Danu, Van Gogh, Vincent, Vincent Van Gogh

Shifting Perceptions About Vincent Van Gogh

Posted on 16/12/2014 | 2 comments

Van Gogh and I

It’s kind of funny. A few posts away I was writing about PERCEPTIONS.

And how everything is a question of perception…

Well, my perceptions about Vincent changed. Of course, they changed for a long time and will still change but now I’m talking about some DRAMATIC shifting in my perception of Van Gogh. It won’t make much difference for anybody else but myself but for me, a life long Vincent Van Gogh unconditioned fan, it does…

First, let’s say that the reading of Naifeh & Smith, ”Van Gogh:The Life” is the cause of this shift. I did not finished the book (900 p and more, common!), I just browsed here and there, the most interesting periods of Van Gogh life (in my perception, of course), the Antwerpen period, Paris, Auvers sur Oise… But that was enough to have a different, less idealized and a lot less flattering image of Vincent……

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Posted in ART, Books, DAnu, Drawing, Ion Vincent Danu, Painting, Vincent Van Gogh

Tagged Danu, Ion Vincent Danu, Naifeh & White Smith, Van Gogh, Van Gogh: The Life, Vincent Van Gogh

December 2001

Posted on 11/12/2014 | Leave a comment

Van Gogh and I

When I remember that time it’s kind of blurry… A lot of new pain, the self realisation that I’m going to be soon old and sick (just discovered I had the diabethes) and very probably neither rich nor famous, the growing up of the children, teenagers now, each of them with his own life and problems, a physical job which payed some bills but gave me no satisfaction… In a word: mid-life crysis. So called mid-life because I knew it then and I know it even more clearly now, I was way over the middle of my life, 3/4 gone or more… When you are 25-30 you don’t think a lot of death and old age and misery. But when you are 45-50, well, it begins to enter your skull the fact that you are far from being immortal. That, in fact, nobody is immortal, not even your children… Everyone…

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The Advantages of Living in a Very Old City

Posted on 24/11/2014 | Leave a comment

Already more than a year since I left Sibiu! and Iohannis – or Johannis? is now the President of Romania! let’s hope that he will be better than Obama for the Americans and will not disappoint those who vote for him and even those woho didn’t…It will be a nice surprise!

Van Gogh and I

One of the main advantages, the one I’ll illustrate for you: there are a lot of festivals, events, exhibition and you can imagine yourself living in more than one epoch…

These are photos I took the last 4-5 days at the Medieval Festival. Very easy to imagine oneself living in that epoch in a city like Sibiu (Hermannstdt). Downtown, everywhere you turn old houses and chrches and fortifications reminds you of the time of Draculya, Vlad the Impaler…

An ancient flame lighting system