IGME Files

I shall never forget July 29, the events that followed hereon were almost dream-like, an art imitating life imitating art.  The characters behind this are non-fictitious.  Any events that followed are based entirely on actual events…

But wait…

It’s purely for the consumption of the actual “actors,” including me…sorry guys!  Meanwhile, below will interest you, may even inspire you. 

That same day, July 29th, I am commemorating the life of an artist who lived 116 years ago, a genius ignored –- Vincent Van Gogh. 

Like for anyone struggling to find a place in the spectrum of things called Life, I am posting quotable quotes from his troubled and difficult life as a painter.  This is for people who stay true with their art amidst commercialism; and also for those who earn their bread at the opposite side, so that means everyone!  The quotes are mainly from Van Gogh’s correspondence over a long period to his brother, Theo.  And you’d agree he’d definitely give a run of writer’s money if he were to live today.

On Art

“I want you to understand clearly my conception of art.  One must work long and hard to grasp the essence.”

On Finding Inspiration

“You do not know how paralyzing that staring at a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can’t do anything.  The canvas stares at you like an idiot, and
it hypnotizes some painters, so that they themselves become idiots. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passioniate painter who is daring — and who has once and for all broken that spell of "you cannot."”
[Letter #378 (to Theo), October 1884]

“Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, that draws us? And if these emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one
works, when sometimes the strokes come with a sequence and a coherence like words in a speech or in a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will again be hard days, empty of inspiration. So one must strike while the iron is hot…” [Letter #504 (to Theo), June-July,
1888]

On Art and Love

“…I feel I am losing the desire for marriage and children, and now and then it saddens me that I should be feeling like that at thirty-five, just when it
should be the opposite. And sometimes I have a grudge against this rotten painting. It was Richepin who said somewhere: "The love of art makes one lose real love." [L'amour de l'art fait perdre l'amour vrai.] I think that is terribly true, but on the other hand real love makes you disgusted with art.”

On Being an Artist (Or The Lack Of)

“He (Gauguin) says that when sailors have to move a heavy load, or weigh anchor, so as to be able to lift a very heavy weight, and to make a huge effort, they all sing together to keep them up to the mark and give them vim.

That is just what artists lack!…”[Letter #496 (to Theo, June 1888]

On Death

“…Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life.

For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots
representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is that we cannot get to a star
while we are alive, any more than we can take the train when we are dead.

So it seems to me possible that cholera, gravel, tuberculosis, and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, buses, and railways are the terrestial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.” [Letter #506 (to Theo),July 16, 1888]