alis’s like vincent’s is one of my most recent works. It’s a mixed media paper collage that I did for the Salvador Dali Museum’s “Paint Your Bedroom Contest”, a promotional event for the “Van Gogh Alive” exhibit they had there earlier this year. I was thankful for the contest. It came at a time when I needed some motivation, an idea of what to work on next and, alas, the contest appeared! (We were going to the Van Gogh show and I was looking for information about it and the museum online and found the contest).

It’s Not the Destination, It’s the Journey

By the way, I didn’t win (boo hoo!) but, really, it didn’t matter. For me, making art is more, if not all, in the thrill and enjoyment of the process and not so much in the final destination. It’s the engaging and challenging journey of getting to completion – especially one that you like in the end (rather than judges) – that keeps me keepin’ on!

My Studio to Look Like Vincent’s Bedroom

The idea of the contest was to share a Van Gogh-inspired painting of your bedroom based on Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles painting. For me, I was inspired by the colors in his painting, the blue on the walls (which I learned was a result of the original painting’s walls fading from purple to blue), the green of the window, the yellow bed with a red blanket and the brown (also originally more pink) of the wooden plank floor.

I tried to incorporate these colors into my “painting” (actually a collage – maybe that’s why I didn’t win!). Instead of my actual bedroom in our home in Venice, Florida, I used my studio as the basis for my composition. The room is pretty much represented as it is except I took liberty to make the window green, turned my blue sofa into a yellow bed with a red blanket (like Vincent’s), the carpet into a wooden plank floor and made the French doors blue.

Overall Success

A lot of this collage, I felt was a success. I especially liked how the St. Petersburg sailboat poster came out and the brown plank floor (I even added green along the planks of the floors like Vincent did in his). With collage, it’s fun to add typical pictures or text found in a variety of papers. With this collage, I mainly used paper from magazines.

Since I was just starting a paper collection for my Venice studio and it was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and shopping for paper was difficult, I started using magazines for my collage papers. I liked using text from the magazines to represent the keys of the piano, though it didn’t come out as perfectly as I wanted. The collage is built on a small base, a 9″x12″ board, and it was often difficult to cut shapes as small as I needed. I truly challenged myself with cutting out the pair of black eye glasses that sit on top of the cabinet in the background on the right and was pretty happy with the end result!

All in all, I was pleased with the overall outcome, a great feeling for an artist! And thank goodness for the many years of doing art that I have come to realize that this – pleasing yourself and not basing the value of your work on what other people think- is one of the most important and satisfying results in making art.

Onward, ho!