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
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
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 not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.
I am always doing what I can't do so I may learn how to do it.
You have to first experience what you want to express
I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.
I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I'll recover from it, I'll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I'll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn't dare to take things in hand?
Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.
Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.
Great things do not just happen by impulse, but as a succession of small things linked together.
One can never study nature too much and too hard
Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.