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
To paint nature you must be in it a long time.
When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.
I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other... complement each other as a man and a woman do.
Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
One must never let the fire go out in one's soul, but keep it burning.
If your inner voice is telling you that you can't paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice.
I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin....
Painting demands an intelligent model.
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life... looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!'
I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.