Painter Van Gogh Quotes

Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, "You can't be a great painter, you only have one ear." And you know what he said? "I can't hear you.

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.

That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.

It's not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight...

Van Gogh cut off his ear gave it to a prostitute who flung it away in extreme disgust. Van, whores don't want ears they want money. I guess that's why you were such a great painter: you didn't understand much else.

Michael Jordan didn’t become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn’t become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.

Do go on doing a lot of walking and keep up your love of nature, for that is the right way to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see. And there are painters who never do anything that is no good...

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? If you hear a voice within saying ‘You are not a painter’ then by all means paint – and that voice will be silenced.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of “you can’t” once and for all. —VINCENT VAN GOGH

When I see how several painters I know here are struggling with their watercolours and paintings so that they can't see a solution anymore, I sometimes think: Friend, the fault is in your drawing. I don't regret for a moment that I did not go in for watercolour and oil painting straight away. I am sure I will catch up if only I struggle on, so that my hand does not waver in drawing and perspective.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

And then there are painters who never do anything that is no good, who cannot do anything bad, just as there are ordinary people who can do nothing but good.

You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’.

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

There's no question about it. The arts are an extremely high-risk situation. People are willing to take these extraordinary chances to become writers, musicians or painters, and because of them we have a culture. If this ever stops, our culture will die, because most of our culture, in fact, has been created by people that got paid nothing for it-- People like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh or Mozart. So, yes, it's a very foolish thing to do, notoriously foolish, but it seems human to attempt it anyway.

He was still on his “two Van Goghs” point. He put his hand on the armrest of her chair. He said, “But the second Van Gogh is just a guy named Vincent. Vincent lived for thirty-seven years. Van Gogh only came to life after Vincent died. Same man, two people.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

Painters understand nature & love her & teach us to see.

If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.

And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her—it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton—a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.

There’s no question about it. The arts are an extremely high-risk situation. People are willing to take these extraordinary chances to become writers, musicians or painters, and because of them we have a culture. If this ever stops, our culture will die, because most of our culture, in fact, has been created by people that got paid nothing for it— People like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh or Mozart. So, yes, it’s a very foolish thing to do, notoriously foolish, but it seems human to attempt it anyway.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them. —ALLEN SHAWN

Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter's life.

There is something in the modern painters that appeals to us more personally and intimately.

It is the painter's duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people.

I should very much like to see Millet reproductions in the schools. I think there are children who would become painters if only they saw good things.

In the first place, it pleased me enormously that Theo and Mr. Tersteeg have entered into business relations in order to make the work of the painters here who are called impressionists known in Holland too.

And then, don’t forget that I am not a born melancholic. The general nickname I have in this neighborhood is “ `t schildermenneke,” [The little painter fellow] and it is not without a certain dose of malice that I go abroad.

You are kind to painters, and I tell you, the more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. You will say that then it would be a good thing to do without art and artists.

You see I am not stronger than other people in that if I neglected myself too much, it would be the same with me as with so many painters (so very many if one thinks it over), I should drop dead, or worse still - become insane or an idiot.

Artists, real artists, have to work. They can’t be hedonists. Really good painters are always working. The world is such a marvelous place. You have to look and to work. That’s exactly why Van Gogh was such a great artist: total commitment. That’s what you need.

Love is an art, Berk. Just like painting or music. Some painters draw mere lines, scratches on the canvas and call them art; some paint stars studded skies like van Gogh; or Chopin’s music conquers the hearts of millions while the execrable disco music blaring out of the open windows of a car have also their audience. Some describe love in high-flown flowery language and you identify yourself with the hero and the heroine and feel yourself in the seventh heaven while some give such a lamentable picture of it that you almost curse it!

Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers—whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.

You have been lucky to meet Guy de Maupassant. I have just read his first book, Des Vers, poems dedicated to his master Flaubert; there is one, “Au bord de l’eau,” which is already himself. What Van der Meer of Delft is to Rembrandt among the painters, he is to Zola among the French novelists.

On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.

There is a school--I believe--of impressionists. But I know very little about it. But I do know who are the original and most important masters, around whom--as round an axis--the landscape and peasant painters will turn. Delacroix, Corot, Millet and the rest. That is my own opinion, not formulated as it should be.

But always those same conventional eyes, noses, mouths - waxlike and smooth and cold. It cannot but always remain lifeless. And the painted portraits have a life of their own, coming straight from the painter’s soul, which the machine cannot reach. The more one looks at photographs, the more one feels this, I think.

Paul Gauguin’s remark about his friend Van Gogh is not without interest: “Il oubliait même,” wrote the famous painter of négresses, “d’écrire le hollandais, et comme on a pu voir par la publication de ses lettres à son frère, il n’écrivait jamais qu’en français, et cela admirablement, avec des ‘Tant qu’à, Quant à,’ à n’en plus finir.”[1]

Well, van Gogh was one of the great painters. During his life he made only 109 dollars in all on his paintings. They are now worth about two million dollars. He had a terribly hard life—loneliness, poverty, and starvation that led to insanity. And yet it was one of the greatest lives that was ever lived—the happiest, the most burningly incandescent

Let them imitate and imitate - and learn and learn. ...who has not seen a young painter in a museum intently copying a Vermeer or a van Gogh, and believing himself on the way to learning something valuable? Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's work - are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there.

Moreover, the material problems of the painter’s life make it desirable that painters should collaborate and unite (much as they did in the days of the Guilds of St. Luke). If only they would ensure their material well-being, and love one another like friends instead of making one another’s life hell, painters would be happier, and in any case less ridiculous, less foolish and less culpable.

The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work has been stillborn.

I shall have to produce an enormous number of things against next year - when the World’s Fair will be held - seeing that my friends will not fail to have many interesting things on hand by then. Not that I myself or any of the painters I hold regular or special intercourse with are going to exhibit along with the others, but it is to be expected that there will be a free exhibition besides the official one. Now, for

Completed in 1888, the following plate is housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It depicts Joseph, the father of the family, who was born on 4 April 1841 in Lambesc. Van Gogh and the postman became good friends and drinking companions. Van Gogh compared Roulin to Socrates on many occasions. In appearance, Roulin reminded the painter of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had the same broad forehead, nose and shape of beard.

At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind Hesse’s recognition that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as man; ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise.’ The primitive religious notion of man’s relation to his creator collapses under the Outsider’s criticism. The Outsider’s wretchedness lies in his inability to find a new faith; he tends to regard his condition of unbelief as the result of a Fall. ^ This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living. His earliest experiences teach him that life is an eternal Pro and Contra. His sensitivity makes him unusually aware of the Contra, of his own misery and the world’s. All his faculties are exerted in a search for the Pro, for instinctive, absolute Yea-saying. Like all artists, he has moments when he seems to be in complete accord with the universe and himself, when, like Meursault, he feels that the universe and himself are of the same nature; then all life seems purposive, and his own miseries purposive. The rest of the time is a struggle to regain that insight. If there is an order in the universe, if he can sometimes perceive that order and feel himself completely in accord with it, then it must be seeable, touchable, so that it could be regained by some discipline. Art is only one form of such a discipline.

is too high up in the air for my taste, too little on solid ground. And, after all, art itself is solid enough, that isn’t the trouble. But being a counting house is a passing thing, “être un comptoir cela passe,” is not a phrase of my own but of somebody whose sayings have come terribly true. I wish you were or would become a painter. I say this straight out, more emphatically than before, because I really believe that the great art-dealing business is in many respects a speculation like the bulb trade was. And the situations in it, dependent on chance and freaks of fortune.

How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

Is that all, or is there more besides? In a painter’s life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is. For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.

Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, “How boring it would be to do this.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didn’t even have the strength to give that idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it - of that flat landscape, where there was nothing but ... infinity - eternity. All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier [Milliet]. I said to him “Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea?” Now this fellow knew the sea. “No, it doesn’t amaze me,” he said, “that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even

Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, “How boring it would be to do this.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didn’t even have the strength to give that idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it - of that flat landscape, where there was nothing but ... infinity - eternity. All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier [Milliet]. I said to him “Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea?” Now this fellow knew the sea. “No, it doesn’t amaze me,” he said, “that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even more beautiful than the ocean; because it is inhabited

When he came here two years ago I had not expected that we would become so much attached to each other, for now that I am alone in the apartment there is a decided emptiness about me. If I can find someone I will take him in, but it is not easy to replace someone like Vincent. It is unbelievable how much he knows and what a sane view he has of the world. If he still has some years to live I am certain that he will make a name for himself. Through him I got to know many painters who regarded him very highly. He is one of the avant-garde for new ideas, that is to say, there is nothing new under the sun and so it would be better to say: for the regeneration of the old ideas which through routine have been diluted and worn out. In addition he has such a big heart that he always tries to do something for others. It’s a pity for those who cannot understand him or refuse to do so.

Are his letters to Diana downstairs?" She sighed. "What is it about girls and letters? My husband left me messages in soap on the bathroom mirror. Utterly impermanent.Really wonderful-" She broke off and scowled. I would have thought she looked a little embarrassed, but I didn't think embarrassment was in her repertoire. "Anyway. Most of the correspondence between the Willings is in private collections. He had their letters with him in Paris when he died. In a noble but ultimately misguided act, his attorney sent them to his neice. Who put them all in a ghastly book that she illustrated. Her son sold them to finance the publication of six even more ghastly books of poetry. I trust there is a circle of hell for terrible poets who desecrate art." "I've seen the poetry books in the library," I told her. "The ones with Edward's paintings on the covers. I couldn't bring myself to read them." "Smart girl. I suppose worse things have been done, but not many.Of course, there was that god-awful children's television show that made one of his landscapes move.They put kangaroos in it. Kangaroos. In eastern Pennsylvania." "I've seen that,too," I admitted. I'd hated it. "Hated it.Not quite as much as the still life where Tastykakes replaced one orange with a cupcake, or the portrait of Diana dressed in a Playtex sports bra, but close." "Oh,God. I try to forget about the bra." Dr. Rothaus shuddered. "Well, I suppose they do far worse to the really famous painters.Poor van Gogh. All those hearing-aid ads." "Yeah." We shared a moment of quiet respect for van Gogh's ear.

The fact is,” said Van Gogh, “the fact is that we are painters in real life, and the important thing is to breathe as hard as ever we can breathe.” So I breathe. I breathe at the open window above my desk, and a moist fragrance assails me from the gnawed leaves of the growing mock orange. This air is as intricate as the light that filters through forested mountain ridges and into my kitchen window; this sweet air is the breath of leafy lungs more rotted than mine; it has sifted through the serrations of many teeth. I have to love these tatters. And I must confess that the thought of this old yard breathing alone in the dark turns my mind to something else. I cannot in all honesty call the world old when I’ve seen it new. On the other hand, neither will honesty permit me suddenly to invoke certain experiences of newness and beauty as binding, sweeping away all knowledge. But I am thinking now of the tree with the lights in it, the cedar in the yard by the creek I saw transfigured. That the world is old and frayed is no surprise; that the world could ever become new and whole beyond uncertainty was, and is, such a surprise that I find myself referring all subsequent kinds of knowledge to it. And it suddenly occurs to me to wonder: were the twigs of the cedar I saw really bloated with galls? They probably were; they almost surely were. I have seen these “cedar apples” swell from that cedar’s green before and since: reddish gray, rank, malignant. All right then. But knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure its distant lights. I still now and will tomorrow steer by what happened that day, when some undeniably new spirit roared down the air, bowled me over, and turned on the lights. I stood on grass like air, air like lightning coursed in my blood, floated my bones, swam in my teeth. I’ve been there, seen it, been done by it. I know what happened to the cedar tree, I saw the cells in the cedar tree pulse charged like wings beating praise. Now, it would be too facile to pull everything out of the hat and say that mystery vanquishes knowledge. Although my vision of the world of the spirit would not be altered a jot if the cedar had been purulent with galls, those galls actually do matter to my understanding of this world. Can I say then that corruption is one of beauty’s deep-blue speckles, that the frayed and nibbled fringe of the world is a tallith, a prayer shawl, the intricate garment of beauty? It is very tempting, but I cannot. But I can, however, affirm that corruption is not beauty’s very heart and I can I think call the vision of the cedar and the knowledge of these wormy quarryings twin fjords cutting into the granite cliffs of mystery and say the new is always present simultaneously with the old, however hidden. The tree with the lights in it does not go out; that light still shines on an old world, now feebly, now bright. I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).

picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was “The Chair”—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen.

PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including “Impressionalists,” “Impressionists,” and “lunatics.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.

Please allow me to wax philosophical. The purpose of eyesight, as well as insight for that matter, is for you and I to be in awe of not just creation itself but of the very One who created it. I will confidently propose that this is the purpose behind creation. Consider this: Evolution cannot explain purpose. It can only explain function. Science can explain how and why you and I function. It might even suggest your function within society. However, science alone will never give you the answer to your ultimate purpose for being on this Earth. “Let’s suppose you go to an art museum. While pursuing the halls of art, your eyes are directed to a certain painting. You become fixated on that painting. It is beautiful. The painting is so mesmerizing and beautiful that you are taken with the image it conveys. You begin to speculate on the story behind the painting. You become emotional and even shed a tear as you stare at it in wonder. For a brief moment in time you become immersed in the essence of this work of art. What is happening here? The one who designed and created the painting did so in order to perhaps bring about an emotional response from the viewer. You didn’t look at the painting and wonder about the chemical makeup of paint or the composition of the canvas mat or what type of device was used to apply those chemical compounds to the mat. You didn’t measure the dimensions of the frame. No. The painter gave that painting a purpose. While the painting itself is remarkable and beautiful, the ultimate purpose of it is to direct you to the one who created it. We give honor to Rembrandt, Monet, Goya, Van Gogh, and Picasso. Why does evolution deny that we give honor to the One who designed, created, and gave beauty to you and me, or to any other created thing? For sure, some evolutionists will try to say that the method the grand Creator used in His creation was evolution but will continue to ignore any mention of His creative hand and minimize other accounts such as the evidence for the origin of life in Scripture. They suppress the truth as they give high honor to their evolutionary theories that they guard with defiance. “The appearance of design isn’t just a common sense factor; it comes from a scientific explanation to which I have spoken here tonight. “Each one of you has the ability to hear, read, study, and think on everything that goes into your mind. While we do well to consider objective theory, we still must then decide for ourselves what it is we are going to believe. We are not just lab rats responding to stimuli. We have the ability to reason, love, express emotions, think deeply on matters, and create things—not just as an evolutionary function but from our innate giftedness and developed talents. “Give much consideration to what is true. Consider what is splendid and beautiful and magnificent. Think on things that are right or lovely or worthy of your admiration. Reflect on those things, not just as some facts of science but on the effect these things have on your very heart and soul. There is a word for those thoughts and feelings that penetrate deep within the depths of your soul. The word is visceral. No other creature on this privileged terrestrial ball has this ability. Visceral feelings are not merely a product of our DNA or the chemical and electrical impulses within our brain. Evolution offers no explanation for these deeply rooted expressions of artistic and creative thoughts and ideas. These things come from our Creator. May we not merely skim the surface of wisdom and knowledge without ever going deep. These things are meant to propel you to a deeper awareness of the world around you. They are even meant to propel us to the eternal realm.

Now, myself as a painter, I’ll never signify anything important, I sense it absolutely." [Letter 768, Saint-Rémy, 3 May 1889]

Like most geniuses, the Countess was a very limited person. Sigmund Freud was so ignorant of the art that Surrealist painters had to explain then- use of Freudian symbols over and over again, and he still didn't get it. Einstein never could remember to take the biscuits out of oven. Those same forces that drive a genius to create things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces (Should you invite Van Gogh to your home he might stand on your sofa in his muddy boots and pee where he pleased), and the very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance, and certainly that sputter less little candle. Same of the mediocre mind known as "common sense" has never produced anything worth celebrating.

We have no idea what Vermeer looked like, not even a hint from some traveler’s journal about whether he was tall or short, a dandy with a taste for silk or a frump in a paint-spattered smock. He was a well-regarded artist in Holland in his own day, but if anyone ever painted his portrait, it vanished long ago. Nor did he fill that blank himself. We have seventy-odd Rembrandt self-portraits (and some forty self-portraits by Van Gogh), but not one by Vermeer.* “Rembrandt, the painter of mystery, is no mystery to us,” remarked the painter Philip Hale a century ago, whereas “Vermeer—the painter of daylight—is engulfed in darkness.

Theo van Gogh was well known in the Netherlands, both as a descendant of the famous painter who shared his surname and as a critic of Islam even more provocative than Fortuyn.

How does someone like Van Gogh who taught himself to paint conclude in his mind and write such words to his brother, Theo, in a letter? He said, Our work has come so far that it will even survive through catastrophe, how did he know? How did he understand that he was that good? That he would put himself among the greatest painters when he only sold one picture, The Red Vineyard. He was the least known of all the painters when he was alive, and yet in death, he is immortalized as one of the most beloved painters of history, Asked Stephanie?

You can paint in two ways. You can paint to compete with other painters; you want to be the greatest painter in the world, you want to be a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Then your painting will be second-rate, because your mind is not interested in painting itself; it is interested in being the first, the greatest painter in the world. You are not going deep into the art of painting. You are not enjoying it, you are only using it as a stepping-stone. You are on an ego trip, and the problem is that to really be a painter, you have to drop the ego completely. To really be a painter, the ego has to be put aside. Only then can existence flow through you. Only then can your hands and your fingers and your brush be used as vehicles. Only then can something of superb beauty be born. Real beauty is never created by you but only through you. Existence flows; you become only a passage. You allow it to happen, that’s all; you don’t hinder it, that’s all.

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace

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 . . .

Il n'y a qu'une chose qui puisse arrêter le cheminement d'un peintre et c'est le succès. Van Gogh a vu cela bien avant moi. La peinture est un cheminement dans l'espace - et non dans le temps. Le peintre cherche en permanence la couleur et le style. S'il rencontre le succès, il bloque son style, il le fige. Pourquoi ? Simplement parce que l'acheteur - le marchand - demande uniquement le style qui se vend, le style qui a du succès. Voyez Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali ou Bernard Buffet...etc, etc. L'artiste connu et reconnu est condamné, à vie, à se copier lui-même ; à copier un moment de son cheminement. Alphonse Daudet disait que le succès (la gloire), c'était la même chose que de fumer un cigare par l'autre bout. Le bout de la braise; donc. Et il avait raison. Mais comme personne n'a le choix - s'agissant du destin - on se situe ici par-delà le bien et le mal et tout jugement moral n'a ici aucune portée *** There is only one thing that can stop the pathway of an artist and this thing is called : success. Van Gogh wrote it long before me. Painting is a pathway through space - and not through time. The painter is constantly looking for new color and new style. If he meets success, he blocks his style, he freezes it. Why ? Simply because the buyer - the merchant - asks only for the style that can be sold, the style that is successful. See Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Bernard Buffet ... etc, etc. The successful artist is therefore condemned, for life, to copy himself; to copy a moment of his pathway. Alphonse Daudet said that success (glory) was the same as smoking a cigar on the other side. The side of the embers. And he was right. But since no one has the choice - when it comes about fate - we are here beyond good and evil and any moral judgment has no value.