Wile E. Van Gogh

The Official Chuck Jones Virtual Experience is pleased to offer CHUCK JONES fans a "Wile E. Van Gogh" Limited Edition work by Chuck Jones.

The Academy Award-winning animation director-artist, Chuck Jones (1912 - 2002) has created many memorable hit TV shows, movies, and short films. He is truly a legend and icon in the art world!

This rare limited edition artwork was created by animation director-artist, Chuck Jones from his vast portfolio of original and limited edition works of art.

The inspiration for this work of art came from a style similar to a work by Russian-French artist, Marc Chagall considered to have an early modernist style.

Around 1988, the founder of Circle Galleries (which had locations around the country and more internationally), Jack Solomon, challenged Chuck Jones with a question "What would the great Masters of the past centuries paint if they could have used your Looney Tunes characters?" Thus a series of Master Works was created in the style of great masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Toulouse Lautrec, Edvard Munch, Salvador Dali, and of course Marc Chagall.

Wile E. Van Gogh based on was based on one of two self-portraits painted in January of 1889 by Vincent Van Gogh. It is one of the lithographs from the MasterWorks series. These lithographs were printed and pulled on an antique Marinoni press at the renowned American Atelier and hand-signed by Chuck Jones in pencil. Limited editions from the Master Series exist in private collections as well as permanent museum collections, including one of Jones's ode to Edvard Munch,

In Wile E. Van Gogh, Jones sought to convey the passionate expressiveness and maniacal focus of his famed alter ego. Just as Van Gogh did in his paintings, Jones applied the paint using different interpretations of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist brushwork---separate patches of color being applied in different directions to enliven and enhance the intensity of the subject. (Chuck Jones has also re-interpreted Van Gogh's other self-portrait of January 1889 in his limited edition lithograph Vincent Van Coyote released in 1989).

Van Gogh, whose influences ranged from the Japanese artist Hiroshige to his contemporaries Pissarro and Seurat, had recently, in a state of madness, cut off a portion of his left ear. Both paintings from January 1889 show Van Gogh with a bandaged ear.

The Scweam is a limited edition given to the Munch Museum in Oslo Norway when their original was stolen in the early 2000s. Chuck Jones was not only a legendary, iconic artist/director from the Golden Age of Animation, but he was an innovator. His ability to create a relationship between reality and its abstract representation has been a centrally enduring preoccupation for modern and contemporary art that Jones beautifully captured in this Master Work series.

The Limited Edition artwork is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.