An image from “Loving Vincent,” a hand-painted feature film.
It’s midday in the 19th century painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hugh Welchman is looking at “Shoes,” Vincent van Gogh’s earth-colored painting of his shoes from 1888.
Unlike other painters, Welchman said, van Gogh “didn’t paint just religious scenes. He painted his shoes, he painted his coffeepot, he painted the person who served him his food, he painted his friends.”
When no friends were around, which was often, van Gogh painted himself.
Welchman is co-director and producer of “Loving Vincent,” a hand-painted animated feature that is itself thousands of paintings. The film is, among other things, a search for the truth about van Gogh’s early death in 1890, which most scholars call a suicide.
“In a way, our film is a love letter to van Gogh,” said Welchman, whose “Peter and the Wolf ” won the 2007 Academy Award for best short film (animated).
“Vincent was incredibly prolific, and that was one of the reasons we could make this film. At the end of his life, he was painting up to two paintings a day.”
“Loving Vincent” revisits the end of van Gogh’s short painting career, which began in 1882. “The 845 surviving paintings all come from that eight-year period, which is very unusual. I think we have 800 surviving Goyas, and Goya was painting for 60 years. And Caravaggio, who was painting for 30 years, still only left 200 paintings,” said Welchman.
Welchman takes an unusual visual approach to probing van Gogh’s vitality and his death at 37.
“Every single frame of our film is an oil painting on canvas,” he explained. But the film isn’t a parade of van Gogh fakes. It tells its story in van Gogh’s pictorial style.
“The difference between our film and other animation films is that you very clearly see the performance of the actors, because we shot the film with actors,” but those performances by Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Chris O’Dowd and others were just the beginning, he stressed.
After the actors were filmed, painters painted them.
“We would put individual frames in front of the painter, and the painter would look at them and do a rendition in van Gogh’s style that we recorded with film cameras,” Welchman explained.
“Each frame is then painted and photographed,” said his wife and co-director, Dorota Kobiela, “adding the expression and brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh.”
Shooting the film in Poland kept costs low, at about $5.5 million, but there weren’t enough Polish painters for the job.
“By the time we got the financing together, we needed 100 painters to finish the film. So we had to recruit people from all over the world,” said Welchman. “We had 125 painters from 15 countries, including five crazy Americans who flew over to audition.” A total of 65,000 frames were painted.
The script’s inquiry into van Gogh’s death follows Armand Roulin (Booth), the son of a postmaster who befriended the painter in Arles in the south of France. The artist had painted members of the Roulin family, including the young and dapper Armand, who wears the same yellow jacket when he searches for the truth behind the artist’s death as he did in his portrait by van Gogh.
“He’s our reluctant detective,” said Kobiela. “He invades the work of Vincent and gets to know it.”
“We’ve already seen other movies where Vincent was the main character. We wanted to do something different, to tell a different story,” she said.
But another invasion might annoy art purists. The film might be seen as an act of appropriation, where van Gogh’s style and palette are recycled into a detective story.
Welchman shrugged as he stood in front of van Gogh’s “First Steps, After Millet” (1890), a peasant scene that van Gogh painted from a photograph when he was confined to the San Remy insane asylum. “Because of his illness, he wasn’t allowed out to paint
Loving Vincent (PG-13) opens Friday, Oct. 6, in Bay Area theaters.
outside, and so he asked (his brother) Theo to send him all of these prints that he loved by ( Jean-Francois) Millet. And his idea was to reimagine it into the medium of color.”
“He loved to paint from nature best,” Welchman explained, “but he wasn’t allowed outside, so this is one of the examples of his reimagining another artist’s work.”
“This is one of the justifications we gave when people said, ‘Who are you to reimagine Vincent’s work into the medium of film?’ ” he noted.
“Vincent himself reimagined prints of his favorite artists — like Rembrandt, like Millet, like ( Jacob) Jordaens — into his new color manifesto. In a similar way, we’re looking to take as inspiration his work taken into another medium,” he said.
“He compared it to being an orchestra, interpreting the work of a composer. He thought Millet was the composer, and he was doing a new rendition of it,” Welchman explained. “He’s the performer. And nowadays, his performances of Millets are much more famous than the original Millets.” No one is arguing with Welchman there.
As for the paintings made for the film, those can now be acquired for a fraction of a fraction of what it costs to own an original van Gogh.
“We’re selling paintings from the film. We still have 750 left to sell,” said Welchman.
The paintings are on the film’s website, but 125 of them will go on view at an exhibition this fall in Nord Brabants, the city where Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853.
“The pictures start at $1,000. These are not original van Goghs,” he stressed. “These are original ‘Loving Vincents,’ which are reimagining his work.”
David D’Arcy is a freelance writer.