Quotes About Van Gogh

But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination.

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.

I'm one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown.

Drawings, as it has so often been said, are the most intimate expressions of an artist. They can reveal the very act of creation, a first idea, the first spontaneous stroke. They can tell much about an artist himself—for instance, that van Gogh in the south of France remembered an etching by Rembrandt, or that Picasso reinterpreted a composition by Millet.

It was a renovated train station housing galleries of famous French impressionists and other artists of the period. Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone, my favorite of them all, was . . . here.

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.

When Van Gogh painted The Starry Night as a swirling mass of cosmic energy, he may have been painting what he saw with neurotic eyes, but he was also painting what he saw with transcendent eyes. The first gave his painting mere form, the second gave it formless, universal emotion that connects directly to the viewer.

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke.

He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine.

The room they lived in looked like the painting of Van Gogh's room at Arles except there was a double bed and two big windows and you could look out across the water and the marsh and sea meadows to the white town and bright beach of Palavas.

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.

A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

To celebrate, I decorated my mess tin with a yellow dandelion blossom. It looked like the sun I so rarely see. Van Gogh would have liked it.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh.

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.

But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that's the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other." "Like Van Gogh.

I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.