Spring Cleaning and Spring Flowers

It's Spring in Chicago, according to the calendar and not at all the actual temperature/weather!

To celebrate, I thought I'd kick off a new project here on the blog. First of all, you might have noticed that the web address and title of the blog have changed, from It's a Christmas Muralcle! to It's a Chalkboard Muralcle!

That's because after the Valentine's countdown, I realized that I wanted to do more with our chalkboard wall, but countdowns to Easter and the Fourth of July didn't sound super appealing.

I thought about what I might like to have on my wall for a long time, something I wouldn't get sick of for a few weeks. The solution: art! Once upon a time I studied art history and I'm still fond of losing myself in museums from time to time. This new version of the blog will feature my favorite works of art--paintings, sculptures, architecture, from pre-Civilation to post-Modern--simplified into chalk.

For today's mural, and the first day of Spring, I thought I'd celebrate with some lovely flowers: Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers (Munich version).

This was tricky! Oil paint doesn't translate super well into chalk, and I had to lose a lot of the beautiful brushwork that characterizes Van Gogh's style. I also don't have quite as nice a range of colors to work with, and chalk isn't the easiest to blend. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Dave's first-view reaction: Nice job, love! Do you feel like you understand the painting better now?*


*That is such an adorably nerdy question, and the answer is yes, I do. I never realized, for example, just how off-kilter the painting is, with all that blank space on the left and the flowers actually going off the canvas on the upper right. And the yellows, holy crow the yellows. So super gorgeous, so subtle in their gradations.

 Still life with flowers, without call box or light switch

 I tried to get his signature just right.
Do you think Van Gogh would appreciate having one of his works translated into chalk on some random woman's wall? I hope so...

 These were the first two flowers I did, when I was just getting the hang of the painting (bonus points if you got the pun!!!)

 These were the last flowers I did, and to me they look freer, more expressive, and more complex (or maybe I was just more exhausted when I drew them)

 The details were crazy-hard to see, and I did a lot of zooming with my iPod in hand

Doh, pretty flowers. This one's staying up for a while.