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Van Gogh Colours Pigment Timeline
Van Gogh Colours Pigment Timeline, Jo Volley, 2021

Van Gogh House, London

photo: Thomas Jenkins

To work directly onto a wall is the most agreeable and impressive kind of work...
Cennino Cennini Il Libro d’Arte

Over Spring 2021 Jo Volley created a timeline charting the specific colours used by Van Gogh across his lifetime. Materials, collated through a close reading of the artist's letters and associated texts, were applied directly to the walls of the Van Gogh House.

The work is a direct result of her ongoing research into the materiality of pigments and builds upon The Pigment Timeline 2014, a visual historical timeline made from 180 pigments from natural and manufactured colour ground in gum Arabic, sequentially ordered chronologically as they emerge onto the artists’ palette from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary and is a unique and innovative visual display of quantitative information.

Other related works include Sampler #1 shown at her one person show New works for the New World at the Linda Matney Gallery, Williamsburg, VA. Sampler #2 in Among the Colours North Lodge, UCL and Sampler #3 in FAITH Austin Forum Gallery, London. During a residency at MACRO Asilo, Rome, Flashe Colour Timeline #1, a timeline of 40 colours from Lefranc & Bourgeois Flashe range, that allowed an expression from the ancient to the modern was exhibited in APERTURES, Fondamenta, Rome. Flashe Colour Timeline #2 was made for the exhibition The Adjacent Possible at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, USA.

Venue

Van Gogh House London, 87 Hackford Road, London SW9 0RE