Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh

Ik zal altijd mijn ogen gebruiken om te zien
Ik zal altijd werken volgens mijn eigen mehtode
I will always use my eyes to see and i will always work by my own methods

How I paint I do not know myself. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me, I look at what is before me, I say to myself that that white board must become something; I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go to look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have too clearly in my mind that splendid subject, to be satisfied with what I made of it. But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered, there may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what wood or shore or figure has told me, and it is not a tame or conventional language, procceeding less from nature itself than from a studied manner or a system.

And i am sick of the bordom of civilization. It is better, one is happier if one carries it out - literally though - one feels at least one is really alive. and it is a good thing in winter to be deep in the snow, in the autum deep in the yellow leaves, in the summer among the ripe corn, in spring amid the grass; it is a good thing to be always with the mowers and the peasant girls, in summer with the big sky overhead, in winter by the fireside, and to feel that it always has been and always will be so.

The wood is becoming quite autumnal - there are effects of colour which I rarly find painted in Dutch pictures.
Yesterday towards evening I was busy painting a rather sloping ground in the wood, covered with mouldered and dry beech leaves. That ground was light and dark reddish brown, made more so by the shadows of the trees which threw more or less dark streaks over it, sometimes half blotted out. the question was, and I found it very difficult, to get the depth of colour, the enormous force and solidness of that ground - and while painting it I perecived only for the first time how much light there still was in the dusk - to keep that light, and to keep at the same time the glow and depth of that rich colour.
For you cannot imagine any carpet so splendid as the deep brownish-red, in the glow of an autumn evening sun, tempered by the trees.
From that ground young beech trees spring up which catch light on one side and are sparkling green there, and the shadowy side of those stems are a warm deep black-green.
Behind those saplings, behind that brownish-red soil, is a sky very delicate, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow - and against it is a hazy border of green and a network of little stems and yellowish leaves. A few figures of wood gatherers are wandering around like dark masses of mysterious shadows. The white cap of a woman, who is bending to reach a dry branch, stands out all of a sudden against the deep red-brown ground. A skirt catches the light - a shadow falls - a dark silhouette of a man appears above the underbrush. A white bonnet, a cap, a shoulder, the bust of a woman moulds itself against the sky. those figures, they are large and full of poetry - in the twilight of that deep shadowy tone they appear as enormous clay figurines being shaped in a studio
I describe nature to you; how far I rendered the effect in my sketch, I do not know myself; but this I know, that I was struck by the harmony of green, red, black, yellow, blue, brown, grey.

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