1. Do these artistic methods – art and writing – help people to understand themselves better? Why is that important?
To understand a great deal about yourself, art and writing help you to understand it. Everybody makes different kinds of art, about different certain subjects. But you won’t like all kinds. If you understand yourself, you know what kind of art you like.

2. Might the answers to these questions be different at any given time?
It’s quite logical, when you’re young you might give other answers than when you are older. Also self-portraits will be different.

3. What do you think Van Gogh is saying to the viewer in this self-portrait?
In his self-portrait from 1888, he used lots of blue. Normally, blue associates with calmness or sadness. But in this painting, it looks more like calmness than sadness. He would have used darker colors for sadness.

4. What do these changes do to the self-portrait and to your ideas about Van Gogh at that point in his life?
He uses different colors than in his self-portrait from 1888. It creates a completely different mood.

5. In which do you think Van Gogh appears calmer?
He looks calmer because of the light blue background.

6. What would you say are two of the most distinctive qualities of a Van Gogh work?
The most distinctive qualities of Van Gogh:
Van Gogh visibly uses brush strokes in contrast of the colors.
His other quality is his use of color.

7. Read these axcerpts from Gauguin’s letters. Do they add to your understanding?
The letters makes you understand what he thought was important in painting

8. Do you find anything unusual about this picture of Gauguin? Click on the painting what happens when the colors change.
The painting of Gauguin has two different faces. If you click on the painting you see a green complexion, it’s a totally different face. Without the green, he looks happy, but with he looks anxious. It has a big effect.

9. Judith Leyster
Judith Leyster is a very skillful and creative artist. In all her self-portraits she looks happy. She’s one of the great female painters of that time.


At the end, the Who Am I exercises were most of the time nice. Some exercises we had to draw weren’t that nice. Such as the digitally decorating of the picture. I didn’t like that because I didn’t knew how the program worked and I like normal drawning more. I’m also not very good at painting, so if we have to paint, I’m just doing something. As almost always with art, it was a nice assignment