Did you know Vincent van Gogh was as expressive and perceptive a writer as he was a painter?
Try this:
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. How is one to get through that wall – since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently.*
As American Artist: Drawing magazine said, “Perhaps only Van Gogh … could make learning to draw sound as subversive as a jailbreak.”
The quote is from Vincent’s letter to his brother, Theo, written on a Sunday afternoon in October 1882.
This letter, and over 900 others, have just been freshly translated and published in the six-volume, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Many of them appear on the magnificent website devoted to the publication: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/
The Sunday afternoon letter is a beauty among beauties. Full of tenderness for Theo, extreme visual acuity and lively and thoughtful analysis of contemporary culture. Here are some quotes:
I can agree entirely with what you say about times one occasionally has when one seems to be deadened to the things of nature, or when nature no longer seems to speak to us.
And similarly the figures of either the English draughtsmen or the English writers, on account of their Monday morning-like sobriety and deliberate austerity and prose and analysis, continue to attract me as something solid and firm which gives one something to hold onto on days when one is feeling weak.
At the moment a wonderful effect can be seen from the window of my studio. The city with its towers and roofs and smoking chimneys stands out as a dark, sombre silhouette against a horizon of light. The light, though, is only a broad strip; above it hangs a heavy shower, more concentrated below, above torn by the autumn wind into great tufts and clumps that float off.
It’s the same with them as with the question of the chicken and the egg: should one make figures for a composition one has done first, or combine the figures made separately so that the composition flows from them? I believe it comes down to the same thing. Just as long as one works.
Adieu, old chap, thanks for what you sent, and a hearty handshake.Ever yours,
Vincent
As the poet W.H. Auden wrote: “.. there is scarcely one letter by van Gogh which I, who am certainly no expert, do not find fascinating.”
*****
Read the full letter with annotations and facsimiles at: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let274/letter.html
* The quotation is from the previous English translation of van Gogh’s letters and was featured in the magazine, American Artist: Drawing, Fall 2005, 24.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Rooftops, View from the atelier (1882), watercolour
Great rooftop painting. Didn’t know that was a van Gogh.
Yeh, it’s an unusual one. SGx