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Color as the Vehicle for Human Emotion
Image: The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh, 1885 |
 Vincent van Gogh |
Color as the Vehicle of Human Emotions
Gauguin's messianic attitude to art was shared by his one-time friend and companion, Vincent van Gogh. The son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, van Gogh was a man of passionate if unorthodox religious convictions, which he wished to communicate to others. He turned to painting only after his failure as an evangelist and a teacher. Through his pictures he preached a message of Christian love and charity, making himself the champion of the outcast and the underdog. With The Potato Eaters, van Gogh, wishing like Millet before him to celebrate the simple dignity of humble peasant folk, chose to paint them partaking of a near-sacramental act. Shortly after finishing The Potato Eaters, van Gogh left his native Holland for Paris, and the remainder of his short life was spent in France. The heavy, somber, dark-toned way of painting that he had learned seemed inadequate now for his ambitions. He aspired to something more expressive. Color was a key to a new world. With the tremendous sense of excitement that characterizes his work, he absorbed all that he could of modern painting as it had been evolved in Paris, studying Delacroix and the Impressionists, then the work of Seurat and Gauguin. It was with Gauguin that van Gogh hoped to establish a community of painters at Arles, in the south of France. But as is well known, this was not to be. The two men were temperamentally incompatible, and their association at Arles brought into the open the latent mental disease that was van Gogh's unfortunate inheritance. Only his suicide, in July, 1890, put an end to the terrifying series of mental blackouts that darkened the last part of his life. In his last three years, he painted the pictures that are probably more widely loved today than any other works of art. Van Gogh chose ordinary, everyday things to paint. But believing that, as he said, "all reality is symbolic," he gave them a value much greater and more universal than the things themselves. |