Vincent van Gogh on Knowledge

"Multimedia study of van Gogh, McLean and Sexton"

"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."

"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."

"..How glad I was when this doctor took me for an ordinary workingman and said: "I suppose you are an iron worker." That is just what I have tried to change in myself; when I was younger, I looked like one who has been intellectually overwrought, and now I look like a skipper or an iron worker."

"I repeat, let us paint as much as we can and be productive, and be ourselves with all our faults and qualities; I say us, because the money from you , which I know costs you trouble enough to procure me, gives you the right, when there is some good in my work, to consider half of it your creation."

"When I came out of the hospital with kind old Roulin I thought that there had been nothing wrong with me, but afterwards I felt I had been ill. Well, well, there are moments when I am wrung by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy like a Greek oracle on a tripod.. .Everyone suffers here either from fever, or hallucination, or madness, we understand each other like members of the same family."

"..How I paint I do not know myself. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me, I look at what is before me, I say to myself that white board must become something, I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little I go to look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I have still too closely in my mind that splendid nature.."

"..I have painted a few studies of the figure.. .I send you two sketches. The painting of the figure appeals to me very much, but it must ripen - I must learn to know the technique better - that which is sometimes called "la cuisine de l'art". In the beginning I shall have to do much scraping, and often to begin anew, but I feel that I learned from it and that gives me a new fresh view on the things."

"What a queer thing touch is, the stroke of the brush. In the open air, exposed to wind, to sun, to the curiosity of the people, you work as you can, you feel your canvas anyhow.. .But when after a time you take up again this study and arrange your brush strokes in the direction of the objects - certainly it is more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and you add whatever you have of serenity and cheerfulness."

"I have about twelve figures of diggers and men who are working in a potato field, and I wonder if I could not make something of it, you have still a few, for instance, a man who fills a bag with potatoes. Well, I do not know for sure, but sooner or later I shall accomplish that, for I looked at it so attentively this summer, and here in the dunes I could make a good study of the earth and the sky, and then boldly put in the figures."

"And at times already I feel old and broken.. .To succeed one must have ambition, and ambition seems to me absurd. What will come of it I don't know ; I would like above all things to be less of a burden to you.. .I hope to make such progress that you will be able to show my stuff boldly without compromising yourself. And then I will take myself off somewhere down south, to get away from the sight of so many painters that disgust me as men."

"I have a study of a garden, almost a metre wide. Poppies and other red flowers in green in the foreground, then a patch of bluebells.. .At the end, black cypresses against little low white houses with orange roofs .. ..I know very well that not a single flower was drawn, that they're just little licks of colour, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, but the impression of all those colours against one another is nonetheless there in the painting as it is in nature.. .You see that the motif is really summery."

"..the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like.. .But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence... That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.. .To give you an example: someone loves Rembrandt, but seriously, - that man will know that there is a God, he will surely believe it.. .To try to understand the real significance, of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God.."

"I brought home a no.15 canvas today, it's a drawbridge, with a little carriage going across it, outlined against a blue sky — the river blue as well, the banks orange with greenery, a group of washerwomen wearing blouses and multicoloured bonnets.. .But, my dear brother — you know, I feel I'm in Japan. I say no more than that, and again, I've seen nothing yet in its usual splendour. That's why , that's why I don't despair of success in this enterprise of going on a long journey in the south. Here I'm seeing new things, I'm learning.."

"So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project and all sorts of necessities are out of one's reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one's spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says “How long, my God!"

"When I was.. ..in the surroundings of pictures and things of art.. .I then had a violent passion for them.. .And I do not repent it, for even now, far from that land, I am often homesick for the land of pictures. Now for more than five years already, I do not know exactly how long, I'm more or less without employment, wandering here and there.. .But you will ask what is your definite aim? That aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch and the sketch becomes a picture.. .. my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects?"

"This winter I met a pregnant woman deserted by the man whose child she bore. A pregnant woman who in winter had to walk the streets, had to earn her bread, you understand how. I took that woman for a model, and have worked with her all the winter. I could not pay her the full wages of a model, but that did not prevent my paying her rent, and, thank God, I have been able thus far to protect her and her child from hunger and cold, by sharing my own bread with her.. .It seems to me that every man worth his salt would have done the same in a similar case. What I did was so simple and natural, that I thought I could keep it to."