A Domestic Interior (Worn Out), Aylesford

I've been lucky enough on a number of very rare ocassions to photograph works by Van Gogh as part of my job so I was fascinated to read about a newly discovered drawing of his. Apparently, many people come forward with works they think may have been painted or drawn by him but a tiny minority are actually proved to be his works.
I absolutely love his drawings and this one (featured in the background of my image) was a preparatory drawing for a painting of his called, very appropriately, Worn Out. It was one of many studies  he made by recruiting models from almshouses for the elderly run by the Dutch Reformed church. He was so poor he could only afford to pay them a tiny fee and some coffee. Many of his subjects names are not known apart from the old man in this one - his name was Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland.
I love the details about the artwork itself. He used a thick carpenter's pencil on coarse watercolour paper and finished the drawing off by rubbing pellets of bread on the lighter parts of the sitter's clothes and then coated it with a fixative made from milk and water which made the pencil marks darker and more matt.
In the rest of the image I just had to include sunflowers and even recreated his signature by sticking it to my kettle!
If you are a Van Gogh fan I would also throughly recommend the book The Yellow House by Martin Gayford. It's a wonderful book about Van Gogh's short and, in the end,  tragic stay in Arles with Gaugin. It is such a vivid and arresting account of his years there.
The other reason for including the drawing in today's image - I've been feeling exactly like the title of his newly discovered drawing. Work is just full on and I'm often having to work half of my lunch hour and after my usual finish time just to keep up. We're being loaded with more and more photography (another sale of ninety paintings added without anyone thinking to tell me!) and at some point it's all going to get too much. Feeling ignored and under so much pressure is not a good thing. Thank God for weekends and a chance to wind down and relax!