Author Archives: Kiki Lin

The artwork I chose is called “Self Portrait with a Straw Hat”.This art work is made by Van Gogh. Van Gogh was born in 1853 at the Netherlands, some of his most famous works are “Starry Night”, “Sunflowers”, and “Bedroom”, and he is known for his works of special use of colors and abstract paintings. After he die, his works gained increasing recognition and popularity. His contribution to art and his unique artworks sytles made him a legendary in the history of art.

When I walking through the gallery this painting just hooked my attention.The strong mix of light and dark colors in his art and his expressive eyes deeply attracted me and made me walk over and take a closer look. At the time I got close I notice that is from Van Gogh, then I had more interest to want to study and write about it, the dark color of farmer looking dress up with a bright eye catching hat is easy for people to get attention to it when going through that many artworks in the gallery.

This artwork is a self portrait of him self wearing a straw hat. In this artwork he was wearing a kind of farmer cloths and is light, means that when he draw this is not in winter season. From what I see this painting is that he use a dark color as a background color and with that he using a eye catching bright color for the hat to make a strong visual contrast. When drawing this art work it was at the year 1886 to 1888 in Paris, at that time he was lacking of money, so he can’t pay for a model for him self to draw, and he decided to buy him self a mirror and start drawing about 20 self portrait art work with different use of color and style.

From the description for this art work “This picture, which shows the artist’s awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory, is one of several that are painted on the reverse of an earlier peasant study.” At that time Van Gogh is trying to draw something new from traditional artwork, he was trying to use a new technique of drawing and new way use of color to establish an abstract painting, which at that time not many artist thought about it, is like he create a new road for abstract painting that still leads artist from today. He use those abstract painting leading people from old time aesthetic to modern aesthetic to lead more art lovers to have a higher level of understanding of arts an ways to look at it.

Resource:

https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0164V1962#details

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

Hello everyone, my name is Qichang Lin, but you can call me Kiki as well, I am a sophomore student at Baruch College. I am majoring in Marketing analysis. I was born in China, and I understand and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin. I am currently living in Brooklyn for right now, if you want to hang out or play with me, you can always reach me out.

During my lifetime as I grew up, I have got myself a lot of different hobbies. When I am bored I like to listen to music and play games, sometimes I go out and hang out with my friends around the city, I can play almost all the sports games and when I am self alone, I like to ride my bike around seaside and while I am riding I will listen to music, this really gives me relax mood. I also like to take pictures a lot, and that’s why I am taking the photography class this semester, I just bought my first camera, and I will try to learn as much as I can and take many beautiful landscape and portrait photos, feel free to ask me to take picture for you as my model.

I came out at the age of 12 I think, and during the time that I just got here, I know nothing. Back in the day, my English was so bad that I could only know a few words, example would be “hello”, “Bye”, “Thank you”, “yes” “no”, and “I don’t know” etc. For the first few years, I have been trying my best to learn English so then I can communicate and live in the U.S. As right now English is still a weakness part of me, but my English has improved from back then, I can communicate with others, and I can understand it from reading the words, but for the harder words that I don’t know or haven’t learned yet, I will be confused and searching it up on translator, but I will keep learning as I grow up, and there is a celebrity quotes in Chinese called “活到老学到老” which in English meaning is that “One is never too old to learn”.

Those are the information about myself, and if you want to learn more about me, be friends with me, talk to me, I don’t bite, and you will have an interesting friend from now on.