Pay your starry, starry nights in a bedroom Vincent could have appreciated when you decorate to complement your Van Gogh print or painting. If your taste runs to the countryside at Arles and you’re enamored of big, exuberant flowers or brooding olive or cypress trees, Van Gogh is your decor guru. Copy the master outright and re-create his own bedroom, or designing a bedroom to show off your newest multimillion-dollar acquisition — or framed museum poster.
Those Sunflowers
Van Gogh’s feverish pace produced so many vibrant paintings which aligning your decor with his decorative way a wide-open selection of motifs and colours. One of his best-known and many treasured works are the sunflower paintings he knocked out within a weekend when his models were no-shows and the fierce mistral wind drove him inside. Paint walls a translucent, watery aquamarine and match the bedding to it with a duvet cover in pale lagoon silk. Frame the walls with a white ceiling and trim; cover a wood or tile flooring with a big area rug in an abstract swirl or geometric pattern of deepest olive-green and shadowed golden maize. Richly polished natural wood furniture and lined linen or rough-woven drapes in the maize tone of this rug reflect the delicate palette of “Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers,” which currently resides in Munich, though its spirit can occupy your bedroom.
A Painter’s Palette
Complementary colours are direct opposites on the color wheel, and Van Gogh loved to juxtapose them in his paintings. Complements can be quite intense and energetic, enlivening a distance with the visual disturbance of the comparison. Yellow or blue and orange appear in numerous paintings, like “Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles” and “Starry Night Over the Rhone.” In a nursery, paint walls creamy pale yellow against a bright blue wall-to-wall carpet. Insert a shiny sunflower-yellow painted dresser, a orange hobbyhorse and pale yellow shades to coordinate with the walls, punctuated around with solid orange and blue alphabet letters. Hang a Van Gogh art poster — “Still Life with Lemons on a Plate,” like — framed in bright enamel within the dresser.
A Softer Side
It wasn’t all Starry Nights, thick brush strokes and clashing green and red bars. Van Gogh went through a Japanese period that produced some of his most delicate and peaceful images. “Blossoming Almond Tree” includes a sky-blue background and a profusion of delicate white almond blossoms bursting from a gnarled gray-green branch. “Irises” unites the purplish-blue flowers with a riot of green stems. “The Courtesan” is a framed display of a Japanese geisha, set against the background of a pond filled with wading herons, lotuses, and bamboo. Create a flowery bower with almond or cherry blossom wallpaper, filmy white dotted Swiss bedding, and pale voile sheers the shade of almost blush blossoms flanked by solid silk gathered curtains in a shade from the wallpaper. Incorporate some Japonaiserie accents with obi-clad Japanese-women ceramic lamp bases on the nightstands, or a hexagonal, painted Japanese corner display.
Vincent’s Rustic Style
The “Bedroom in Arles” shows both Van Gogh’s impoverished circumstances and his eye for form and beauty that discovered subjects wherever he looked. Leave your wood floors exposed; paint the walls, doors and ceiling medium blue, and the window frames midnight blue or charcoal. Color-wash walls to get a feeling of texture — Van Gogh’s brushstrokes and blended hues are so distinctive that nothing in his work appears flat, and neither should your own walls. Wall pegs and hooks will hold your jackets and painter’s smock or bathrobe. Large nails, hammered straight into the wall, hook exposed picture wires to display your present framed works of unassailable genius. The bed, with a simple wood headboard and foot board, could readily function as a daybed — cover it with yellow bed sheets along with a red blanket. Insert two rush-bottomed seats and a little wood side table with a bowl and pitcher, and you may dream of museum retrospectives in your sleep.