47 Vincent Van Gogh Quotes on Art

Vincent Van Gogh quotes on art

5. I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

7. Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

11. Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.

20. I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity. 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 mesmerises 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. Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, 'defiles' - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.

21. A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

23. After all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what wood or beech or figure has told me, and it is not a tame or conventional language, that proceeds not from nature itself but from a studied manner or a system.

26. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

32. How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.

36. I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

37. I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

38. I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...

39. I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time: the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.

40. I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

42. I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

43. I have drawn into myself so much that I literally do not see any other people anymore - excepting the peasants with whom I have direct contact, since I paint them.

44. I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

45. I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

47. I want to do drawings which touch people...In figure or landscape I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.

49. I'm able to get by very well in life, and also with my work, without beloved God. But I, a suffering human being, can not survive without there being something greater than myself, which for me is my whole life- the creative power... I want to paint men and women with that certain eternal touch- an idea which the sacred halo embodied earlier and which we seek to express today through light and the palpitating movement of our colors...The love between a couple is expressed by the unity of two complementary colors, by their mixture and contrasts, by the secretive vibrations of similar tones; the intelligence of a forehead is portrayed by using a light tone on a dark background; hope by a star and a man's passion by a vibrant sunset.

54. If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

55. In my painting of the 'All -Night Cafe' I've tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, become crazy and criminal. Through the contrast of the delicate pink, blood red and dark red, of mild Louis-XV and Veronese green against the yellow-green and stark-blue tones- all this in an atmosphere like the devil's inferno and pale sulphurous yellow...I've tried to convey the sinister power of such a place.

56. 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.

59. It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

60. It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

63. It would be difficult for me to express all my thoughts about it. It remains a constant disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome immediately. Making progress is like miners' work: it doesn't advance as quickly as one should like, and also as others expect; but faced with such a task, patience and faithfulness are essential. In fact, I don't think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much, one would get dazed or confused.

64. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

69. Now since I have seen the ocean with my own eyes, I feel completely how important it is for me to stay in the south and to experience the color which must be carried to the uttermost - it is not far to Africa.

70. Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were.

73. One wants to be an honest man; one is so, one works hard; but still one cannot make both ends meet; on must give up the work, there is no chance of carrying it out without spending more on it than one gets back for it; one gets a feeling of shortcoming, of not keeping one's promises. One is afraid of making friends; like an old leper, one would like to call from afar: Don't come too near me, for intercourse with me brings you sorrow and loss. One cannot present oneself as somebody who comes to propose a good business or who has a plan which will bring great profit. On the contrary, it is clear that it will end with a deficit, and still one feels a power surging within; one has work to do and it must be done. One must set to work with a calm, everyday face, live one's ordinary life, get along with the models, with the man who comes for the rent, with everybody, in fact. You must not think of me as afraid.

75. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

80. Thank God, I have my work, but instead of earning money by it, I need money to be able to work; that is the difficulty. I think there are no signs in my work that indicate that I shall fail. And I am not a person who works slowly or tamely. Drawing becomes a passion with me, and I throw myself into it more and more. I do not have great plans for the future; if for a moment I feel rising within me the desire for a life without care, for prosperity, each time I go fondly back to the trouble and the cares, to a life full of hardship, and think: It is better so; I learn more from it, and make progress. This is not the road on which one perishes. I only hope the trouble and the cares will not become unbearable, and I have confidence I shall succeed in earning enough to keep myself, not in luxury, but as one who eats his bread in the sweat of his brow.

81. The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

82. The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

83. The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.

84. The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

85. The painter of the future will be a colorist, such as has never yet existed. Manet was working towards it, but as you know the Impressionists have already got a stronger color than Manet. This painter of the future- I can't imagine him doing the rounds of the local dives, having false teeth and frequenting the Zouave brothel like me.

87. There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

89. What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

90. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

92. When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

97. The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

98. In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out against a yellow background; the ends of their stalks bathe in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In one corner of the painting, the painter's signature: Vincent. And the yellow sun, coming through the yellow curtains of my room, floods all this flowering with gold, and in the morning, when I wake up in my bed, I have the impression that it all smells very good. Oh yes! he loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth. When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? He, taking his yellowest brush, wrote on the suddenly purple wall: I am of sound mind, I am the Holy Ghost.

99. Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey Look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils Catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land.

101. Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

102. For they could not love you, but still your love was true And when no hope was left in sight, on that starry starry night You took your life as lovers often do, But I could have told you, Vincent, This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

103. Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls Frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can't forget. Like the stranger that you've met, the ragged man in ragged clothes The silver thorn of bloody rose, lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

104. Now I think I know what you tried to say to me How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen they're not listening still... Perhaps they never will...