I love Vincent Van Gogh, love his colors, his brush-strokes. I love the myth, his prolific letter writing, his true “Lust for Life,” his absinthe-shrouded path to his end. His over-the-top popularity, his obsessions permeating other creative people’s obsessions in books and films … and in art shows, when the theme is re-creating and changing a popular work of an “Old Master.”

That was my assignment a while back for an art group to which I belonged. I hadn’t copied an artist’s painting since early art training, and I chose Van Gogh’s “Green Wheat Fields with Cypress,” 1889.

My assignment to me, however, was to see if I could copy, if I would “color inside the lines,” something I refused to do, even as a child with my coloring books and Crayolas, even with my “paint by numbers” sets.

Well, I almost did, copy Vincent, that is. I drew onto my canvas and copied the basic landscape, the fields and hills and clouds, the little house, the big cypress. I researched Vincent’s colors and came as close as I could to his thick oil paints with available acrylic colors (eliminating the faded streaks of pink in the blue sky; his reds have faded over the era, but that’s for a later post).

But when it came to the foreground, I couldn’t copy his brushstrokes for the weeds and shrubs. Blobs. Streaks. My tiniest brushes didn’t work.

So wiped off my blobs and streaks and picked up a turkey feather (of which I have many). Dipping it into thick acrylics piled onto my palette, I dragged the feather, giving it a quick jerk to make the ends of the cattails, swishing it to form leaves and stems. Playing like crazy.

Such fun I had. And no, I still can’t color inside the lines.