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
Well, I am ploughing on my canvases as they do on their fields (the peasants). It goes badly enough in our profession - in fact that has always been so, but at the moment it is very bad.
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.
Love is something eternal.
Love is eternal -- the aspect may change, but not the essence. There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too, and that is its real function. And love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.
Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.
I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
Conscience is a man's compass.
The great isn't something accidental; it must be willed.
What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.
If I did not succeed I still thought that what I had worked on would be continued. Not immediately. But there are others who believe in things that are true.
If one were to say but few words, though ones with meaning, one would do better than to say many that were only empty sounds, and just as easy to utter as they were of little use.
What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.
Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.