Ch 1 Artists Van Gogh vs. Tim Hawkinson

The first set of artists from chapter one that I would like to compare
and contrast is Van Gogh’s Self Portrait and Tim Hawkinson’s Emoter.
Vincent van Gogh’s chief symbol of expression is color. Van Gogh
suffered from seizures which doctors believed to be caused by temporal
lobe epilepsy. Medications and treatments related to temporal lobe
epilepsy has been known to cause patients to see yellow spots and have
a hallucinations and doctors today attribute that to his use of bright
colors and yellows in his paintings. Van Gogh also suffered from other
mental and physical conditions that doctors today believe to be manic
depression and or bipolar disorder. Van Gogh created his most famous
work The Starry Night while staying in an asylum in
Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France. Vincent Van Gogh took an interest in
art at the age of 27, and in a short period of ten years he made
approximately 900 paintings. Vincent only sold one painting during his
lifetime and only became famous after his death. Vincent shot himself
in a wheatfield in Auvers, France but did not die until 2 days later
at the age of 37.
Tim Hawkinson’s “Emoter,” is a 2-D mechanical facial puppet whose
expressions are dictated by random patterns of light from a
television, suggests a struggle with self-knowledge. In this altered
self portrait Hawkinson attributes the appearance of consciousness to
the firing of electrical impulses. The artist’s expressions, which are
familiar signs of consciousness, are dictated at random in an
unpredictable manner. From what I read Tim Hawkinson is obsessed with
life and death and time passage, and in my opinion that may be the
reason that there is something of an underlying morbidity in his art.
In Van Gogh’s self portrait he seems to be an introverted and somber
kind of man that doesn’t smile often. Tim Hawkinson’s Emoter which is
also a self portrait shows a man that I think is a bit lost or pulled
in so many directions by different things that he can’t keep things
together. In my opinion both portraits show a man that is somewhat
disturbed and or in sad state of mind. Some differences in the two
pieces are that Van Gogh’s self portrait is completely emotionless
while the Emoter has so many warped expressions that you cannot
pinpoint just one single emotion. Another difference is that Van Gogh
uses a lot of color and the portrait is somewhat easy to look at while
Hawkinson’s work has a plain background and is the grisly photo is
hard to look at for too long.