Vincent van Gogh is renowned for his Post-Impressionistic paintings, depicting open air scenes with lush color and swirling movement. Using Photoshop, Redditor melonshade has reimagined some of the artist’s masterpieces, blurring the backgrounds as if filtering the works through a tilt-shift lens.
The digital technique appears like a modern cousin to the hyper-stylized aesthetic of the Post-Impressionism movement, warping sharper shapes into softened forms to heighten sensory and emotional impact. Melonshade’s editing attracts attention to van Gogh’s bold tints, calling for a second look at the rich blues, greens, and golds in the original tableaux, while the hazy portions emphasize the textures in the unmodified patches. Each scene seems to pop forward from the canvas—or, rather, from the screen—with new vibrancy and dimension.
On his Reddit thread, melonshade explained that his work was inspired by another modern artist’s similar concept. Though some users questioned whether he might have saturated the images, he said that he did nothing to manipulate them except to add the hazy effect. He noted, “Many of [van Gogh’s] later paintings are much brighter and more colorful than the rest. I read that he started to use more colours because he wanted to paint things the way he saw them, not the way they were.” Similarly, melonshade has shown how we might have viewed van Gogh’s depicted landscapes in real life, with our eyes focused on salient figures in the foreground and the rest fading to a gentle blur.
via [Laughing Squid, Reddit]
All images via melonshade.