Van Gogh’s Salad Days

What was this? TV comedy character Mr. Bill? No, it was part of last week’s The Other Van Gogh Exhibit: Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait as an Artist” rendered in squash, red cabbage, dried bananas and jicama, at Eagle Rock Gifted Magnet School.

The seventh-grade classes at the school had been studying a unit on Van Gogh and even made a trip to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. So it wasn’t very far-fetched for teacher Sara Leiber McKinney to assign the them to reproduce Van Gogh paintings in the form of salads. Since this was a school project, it had an improving slogan: “Van Gogh and Vegetables: Five a Day--That’s the Way!”

The students chose up teams, as for a playground sport at recess, and each picked a Van Gogh painting. McKinney provided color photocopies of the paintings on which they arranged the vegetables. “Like the Rose Parade,” she points out.

“I told them, ‘I want you to be able to pronounce the name of your painting,’ ” McKinney says. “So their hands shot up--they all wanted to do ‘Wheat Field With Crows.’ ” In fact, both the Period 3 and Period 4 class produced their own “Wheat Field With Crows.”

The vegetable artists often had a problem getting the visual texture right, though “Garden With Flowers” did capture Van Gogh’s anxious sketchiness.

But the biggest challenge was color. “There aren’t that many blue vegetables,” observed Hana van der Ster with regret. Her team had tackled “The Plain of Auvers.”

For red, peppers were an obvious choice, and the students who rendered “Vase With Poppies, Daisies, Cornflower, Peonies and Chrysanthemums” cleverly used radish skins for the poppies. For yellow--fortunately, one of Van Gogh’s favorite colors--students had yellow peppers and up to three squashes to work with. The version of “Hospital Corridor at St. Remy” was particularly brilliant (the little man standing in the hall was a slice of wood ear mushroom).

And green obviously offered great scope. “Cypress” had impressively roiling leaves of fresh dill, not to mention some disturbing bean sprout clouds in the sky. Students could use olives for black and jicama or potato for white.

But for blue, they had to make do with red cabbage, blueberries or eggplant skin. One team suggested rosemary flowers, but McKinney nixed it: “I told them I wanted it to be edible, and not that many people eat rosemary flowers, or raw potato skins. But they didn’t entirely comply.”

In fact, most of Period 3’s paintings used raw potatoes in one form or another, to particular effect in “Sheaves of Wheat.” On the other hand, Van Gogh might not have objected, since his first great painting was “The Potato Eaters.”