No Regrets Journal - Van Gogh in His Own Words - Issue 25, Spring 2019

No Regrets Journal

Van Gogh In His Own Words Spring 2019 Issue 25


No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the exploration of being and meaning.

Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer, collage artist claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster Submissions are by invitation of the editor Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page No Regrets Journal, haikus poems and photographs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal 

Preface This issue of No Regrets Journal is dedicated to the work and words of Vincent Van Gogh captured from reading the three volumes of his letters.

Most of the hundreds of letters were sent to his brother Theo, but he also corresponded with other members of his family as well as artists and friends. “I have a terrible lucidity at moments, these day when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself any more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream.�

And so it was with his portraits, landscapes and life itself. Julian Barnes called him an evangelist for color. 

Introduction “To live, to work, and to love are really one.”

He saw painting as essential to his own life and to the life of others who would see his work, “There is something infinite in painting—I cannot explain it to you so well—but it is so delightful just for expressing one’s feelings. There are hidden harmonies or contrasts in colors which involuntarily combined to work together and which could possibly be used in another way.” A continuous commitment to authenticity and transparence capture what he sees and feels.

Technique per se is irrelevant. The key is to constantly work at your art and use your skills to render what you see, intuit, love and respect. “…in a picture I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with…something of the eternal…which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring…Ah portraiture, with the thoughts, the soul of the model but that is what I think will come.”

Always an avid correspondent, he left three substantial volumes of letters with the vast majority of them to his ever supportive and attentive brother, Theo. It was Theo who originally encouraged Vincent to become an artist. Although Theo wrote an equal volume of letters, given his brother’s peripatetic living situation, only a few of his letters were preserved. Over the years Vincent tried to convince Theo to leave being an art dealer and become an artist himself working side by side with his brother.

Vincent worked intensively at the task of becoming an artist. He saw the world and nature as works of art and depicting those works was the responsibility of the artist.

As a boy he began with an ever more intensive commitment to drawing preferably from nature, life and models. The artist must understand and capture nature’s design and essence in order to create meaningful art. He attacked scenes and objects always looking to improve his drawing skill that he called “the backbone of painting.”

He would describe going out to paint as “attacking“ the cypress trees or landscape that he was working on, “…one must not extinguish one’s power of imagination, but the imagination is made sharper and more correct by continually studying nature and wrestling with it.” “…it is impossible to conquer nature and to make her more amenable without a terrible struggle without more than ordinary patience.”

His efforts were supported with money, supplies, prints and a shared interest in all aspects of art throughout Theo’s career as an art dealer.

Theo provided a tether and connection to the world for his passionate

brother. In their letters, they continually discussed art, artists, art reviews, art exhibitions, family issues, literature and philosophy among many other subjects.

They were avid collectors of prints including hundreds of Japanese Ukiyo-e predominantly in woodblock prints. The focus of the movement was to capture the every day lives and activities of the common people which was a deep interest of van Gogh.

He was completely absorbed by his work and relentlessly pursued it, “If I have now reached a point…when I stand before an object or figure, I feel within me clearly, distinctly, unhesitatingly the power to draw it—to render it—true in its general structured proportion…primarily because your help was a kind of fencer shield between a hostile world and myself and…I could in all calmness think almost exclusively of my drawing, and my thoughts were not crushed by fatally overwhelming material cares.”

The Japanese prints were a profound influence on Vincent. His letters often discuss and describe them. When he moved to Provence late in his life, he was convinced that Provence shared Japanese characteristics including the use of color. His late treatments of the sun and solid background colors reflect some of the Japanese approaches.

His relationship with his parents, particularly his father was not easy, “They will never be able to understand what painting is….the figure of a laborer—some furrows in a plowed field—a bit of sand, sea and sky—are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful that it is indeed worth while to devote one’s life to the poetry hidden in them.”

He was extraordinarily well read. His passion for books was only exceeded by his drive to understand nature, the human form and create art. One of his favorite authors, Emile Zola, indirectly provided some guidance to considering van Gogh’s drawing and paintings, “a work of art is a bit of the creation seen through a temperament.” He provided his own description of what he searched for in books, “…you read the books to borrow there from the force to stimulate your activity…but I read the books searching for the man who has written them.”

“I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.” Over his creative trajectory, color became of ever greater import to integrate the paintings and establish form. “But this much I want to tell you—while painting, I feel a power in my color that I did not possess before….” As Julian Barnes notes, “No one did color more blatantly than and more unexpectedly than Van Gogh. Its blatancy gives his pictures their roaring charm. Colour, he seems to be saying: you haven’t seen colour before, look at this deep blue, this yellow, this black; watch me put them screechingly side by side. Colour for Van Gogh was a kind of noise....he had grown up to become an evangelist for colour.”

Barnes goes on to articulate the underlying content of the paintings, “I am not sure that Van Gogh’s paintings change for us very much over the years, that we see him differently, find more in him, at sixty or seventy than we did at twenty. Rather, it is the case that the painter’s desperate sincerity, his audacious, resplendent colour and his intense desire to make painting ‘a consolatory art for distressed hearts’ take us back to being twenty again.

Not a bad place to be.”

He wanted to find the infinite in the finite, touch the viewer’s soul and ease people’s lives with his work. He was only truly home in the act of being an artist translating what he saw in to drawings and drawing in to paintings that became more real than reality itself.




immense citron-yellow sun violet field Prussian blue sower Prussian blue tree 




cypresses always occupying my thoughts line and proportion of an Egyptian obelisk green distinction a splash of black in a sunny landscape you must see them ‘in’ the blue I…love the man who knew the whole forest from insect to wild boar from stag to lark from great oak and rock mass to the fern and blade of grass




birds eye view of vineyards newly reaped wheat endless repetitions toward the horizon like the surface of the sea bordered by little hills of the Crau train running across the field that flat landscape nothing but infinity eternity




because he was so still when he was posing I painted him two times the second time a single sitting broken tones in the face greens violets pinks reds set against a blue-white background Prussian blue uniform yellow decorations




just a bedroom color will be everything pale violet walls red tiles floor yellow wood bed and chairs color of fresh butter greenish citron sheets and pillows scarlet bed coverlet




bull neck Zouave bronzed feline head cropped black hair small sunburned face eye of the tiger blue uniform red and yellow trimmings faded orange braids two stars on his breast red cap greenish door orange brick wall




a few strokes of the brush bristlingly loaded like a porcupine painter’s easel canvasses sticks to foil whining winds yellow house green door white washed walls colored Japanese prints red tile floor short midday shadows blue sky over it  




night sky moon without radiance slender crescent barely emerging from opaque earth cast shadow star brilliance pink and green in the ultramarine sky clouds hurrying old inn yellow lighted windows straight somber cypress two late wayfarers

a dead willow trunk hanging over a pool covered with reeds alone and melancholy moss covered bark a scaly skinned serpent greenish yellowish but mostly dull black with bare white spots and knotted branches I attack it tomorrow  




a night cafe figures on the terrace drinking yellow lantern sheds light on the house front and sidewalk pinkish violet pavement gable-topped houses stretch away the sky spangled with blue and violet stars

mousmé’s costume royal blue skirt orange violet bodice striped blood red yellowish gray flesh tones hair violet touched black brow framed Prussian blue with orange eyes white background tinged malachite green she holds a branch of oleander

imagine me sitting early morning window a flock of white pigeons over red tile roofs soaring between black smoky chimneys behind it all a wide stretch of soft tender green miles and miles of meadows calm peaceful gray sky.

Epilogue His story and his letters are about family, brothers, love, passion, faith, the nature of being itself and always and finally the nature of art and work.

Vincent van Gogh spent his life searching for himself through immersion in relationships and causes. The first cause was to devoutly, intensively love a woman. She did not love him. He was rejected.

He then turned to religion devouring the Bible, “…whoever wants to preach the gospel must carry it in his own heart first. Oh! may I find it…” He saw Christ as the ultimate artist who could mold living flesh through the word. He tried to become a minister, a preacher. It was not to be. His mother who also was a recipient of his letters described him, “Poor boy, he does not take life easily.”

His own take on himself was complex, “…neither a Dutchman, nor an Englishman, nor yet a Frenchman, but simply a man.” He was fluent in reading and writing French. Early on he worked for an art dealer in The Hague, London and Paris.

It was his devotion to becoming an artist, drawing, painting, reading, going to exhibits, interacting with other artists that became the center of his life. He knew before he died that he had become a painter who could capture what he saw. He always searched and critiqued his own work and the work of others. Inevitably there was always something more that could be done, made more intense, made more “real.” When he went to Southern France, he hoped to begin a community of artists. It was not to be.

He responded to the colors of Provence, “I have a lover’s insight a lover’s blindness for work just now.” “Because these colors about me are all new to me, and give me an extraordinary exaltation.”

He predicted the recognition he would receive after his death, “But the painter of the future will be ‘a colorist such has never yet existed.’ Manet was working toward it…but the impressionists have already got a stronger color than Manet… but this painter who is to come—I can’t imagine him living in little cafés, working away with a lot of false teeth and going to the Zouaves’ brothels, as I do.”