SubscribeVincent Van Gogh Love Quotes and Sayings
Posted on Oct 05, 2008 under Post-Impressionist painter, The Starry Night, V, Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent Willem van Gogh | 2 CommentsVincent Van Gogh’s Love Quotes and Sayings
1. Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.
2. Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.
3. I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
4. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.
5. The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: 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 for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age of 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history’s greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Although he was little known during his lifetime, his work was a strong influence on the Modernist art that followed. Today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world’s most recognizable and expensive works of art.
Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers and traveled between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught in England. An early vocational aspiration was to become a pastor and preach the gospel, and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium. During this time he began to sketch people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of sombre earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later he moved to the south of France and was taken by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style which became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.
The extent to which his mental illness affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of sickness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh’s late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and “longing for concision and grace”.
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Famous Sayings by Vincent van Gogh
1. As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.
2. Conscience is a man’s compass.
3. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
4. Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
5. Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
6. How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
7. I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
8. I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.
9. If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
10. In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.
11. It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.
12. One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.
13. One must work and dare if one really wants to live.
14. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.
15. Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
16. The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
17. The way to know life is to love many things.
18. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
19. By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day. I haven’t yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it . . . .
20. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.
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Vincent by Don McLean was written as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh. It is also known by its opening line, “Starry Starry Night“, a reference to Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night (the painting on the left). The song also describes different paintings done by the artist.
McLean wrote the lyrics in 1971 after reading a book about the life of the artist. The following year, the song became the number one hit in the U.K. and No. 12 in the U.S.
