Vincent

Dutch autobiographical cartoonist Stok debuts in English with this contribution to a new graphic-novel series on modern artists that covers the most famous period in the life of Vincent van Gogh, February 1888 to May 1890, when he lived in the Provençal town, Arles. During this time he painted many of his greatest pictures, hosted Paul Gauguin at the house he hoped would become the center of an artists' colony, and, unfortunately, descended deeper into mental illness. Drawing on his correspondence with his art-dealer brother, Theo, Stok traces the mental state as well as the movements of the great artist. When his mind becomes fraught, she has a cloud of fly-like dots fluctuate as his seizure-like madness burgeons and dissipates. When he fully loses control, Stok makes his surroundings undulate with hallucinatory patterns, reflecting the look of his Starry Night but pushing beyond it into the expressionism that painting forecasts. While approximating van Gogh, she sticks to her own elemental, comic-strip-like style that suggests both a simplified Tintin and a more complicated Peanuts.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist

Using pop art to describe fine painting, Stok's offbeat comics biography of Vincent van Gogh follows the Dutch-born painter from his time in Arles, France, to his death. Stok doesn't try to reproduce van Gogh's visuals; instead, she uses heavy lines, solid colors, and minimal background details to focus attention on characters and history. When she breaks away from this pattern-in jagged panel lines showing van Gogh's slipping sanity, or the brilliance of his paintings exploding behind him-it's emotionally charged and made all the more immediate by the iconography. Stok uses bright nonprimaries and solid background pastels for the figures and action. There's great beauty, and not just in van Gogh's madness and passion: sections of his letters to and from his brother Theo are touching. This inventive art biography eschews the usual visual clichés and brings its subject into a sharp and sympathetic focus. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

At first glance, one is a bit suspicious of Vincent. Van Gogh's style is so singular, how could a line-drawn cartoon with a minimalist approach to detail and a palette of primary colors do him any justice? As it turns out, it can pretty perfectly. Stok's graphic biography picks up near the end of van Gogh's life (1853-90), following Vincent's attempt (and failure) to set up an artist's colony in Arles, his psychotic episodes, his stays in psychiatric hospitals, and through it all his dogged persistence in finding and creating beauty in the world. Vincent quotes liberally from van Gogh's correspondence with his brother Theo without feeling overly documentary and makes clear visual references to artworks such as Starry Night, The Bedroom in Arles, and Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin without feeling derivative. Although the artist's life was ultimately tragic, through simple imagery and gentle storytelling Stok exquisitely evokes his unwavering belief in the world's beauty and the depth of emotion that his paintings communicate across cultures and centuries. Verdict By working honestly with the facts of van Gogh's life and sparingly recalling his paintings rather than copying them directly, Stok has drawn an emotional, informative, and inspirational biography for artists and art lovers everywhere. Fantastic.-Emilia Packard, Austin, TX (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.