Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by symbolic colourisation and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive paintwork. He sold only one painting during his lifetime and...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth30 March 1853
CityZundert, Netherlands
The more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragile I am, the more I become an artist.
We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.
I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.
I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.
I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.
The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.
One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.
One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
But you must love with a sublime , genuine , profound sympathy , with devotion, with intelligence , and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God , that will lead to an unshakeable faith .
It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.
I wish they would take me as I am.
The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.
The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.
To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life