Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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...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?
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Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
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Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.
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The majority of (painters), because they aren't colorists, do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South (of France) and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs
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To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.
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Surely the true path is to dive deep into nature.
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Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.
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It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind.
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l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create.
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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.
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For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
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One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.
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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.
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Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.
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If your inner voice is telling you that you can't paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice.
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I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
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For myself, I declare I don't know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream.
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I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.
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I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.
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I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.
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I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.
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Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.
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One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.
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In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.