Making The Paintings

To make the huge billboards for our schoolproject, we needed a place to produce the billboards. And how should we do it then?

The making of Fishing
boats on the beach
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The headmaster of the school offered the auditorium. Lots of plastic pieces had to be placed on the floor had to prevent paint spots. The whole auditorium seemed wrapped like a Christo. On stage were spots created to take and mix the paint and buckets with water were placed to clean the brushes. The paintings would be realized on ten plywood panels of 3 x 4 meters or 4 x 3 meters.

One of the take and mix
paint spots with Cafe
terrace at night on the
background
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TThe art teachers made a teaching package and a schedule for the students with instructions and background info about van Gogh, big paintings and land art projects. Thanks to the schedule every student knew the moment to show up in the auditorium to paint. They would paint in groups of fifteen students during sessions of 100 minutes each. Students who had painted in the auditorium in one week, had to,in the other week work in the classroom to do an assignment from the teaching package (see paintings & sketches by students). Having grounded the panels, they were put to the wall and slides of the original paintings were projected on them. These projections were traced on the panels with big markers. In the meantime the art teachers showed slides with details of the works, the movie "Lust for life", about the life of van Gogh, and the whole painting crew went on the bus to Amsterdam te see the originals in the Van Gogh museum.

Making The Langois Bridge
with women washing
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Having grounded the panels, they were placed on the wall and slides of the original paintings were projected on them. These projections were traced on the panels with big markers. In the meantime the art teachers showed slides with details of the works, the movie "Lust for life", about the life of van Gogh, and the whole painting crew went on the bus to Amsterdam te see the originals in the Van Gogh museum. Before starting to paint, every group of fifteen students took artbooks , posters and reproductions of "their" painting and at the start they got a briefing from their teacher: everybody knew what to do. Mixing the paint to get the right colors was quite difficult but at last every team succeeded in finding the right touch for every painting. First the biggest color fields were painted, when it seemed all right at first sight, details followed. After two months, the paintings were finished.