Vincent van Gogh Life and Art

His name is immortal. His life is one of unimagined pain and sorrow. His palette consisted of the colors of the sun, his one true love. How he sought to understand and capture it. How it had eluded him so throughout his life. Vincent van Gogh, not an artist for arts sake, but for the sake of the humanities. His life is the story of a great and passionate heart, filled entirely with but only two things: love and sorrow. His works reflect his entire being, for that is the reason that he started painting. It was his savior from mental illness. It was his only means of escape from the cruel and heartless world that he imagined he lived in. His life could be defined by a statement he made at his own fathers deathbed: ³Dying is hard, but living is harder still².
Van Gogh's works are classified as being generally Post-Impressionism. Like the Renaissance, Impressionism made an irreversible difference, the viewer naturally senses that all art since that time has been ³after Impressionism.² The Artists who rejected Impressionism toward the end of the 19th century painted not only what they observed, but what they felt, finally setting painting free to deal with emotions as well as material reality. They experimented with new subjects and techniques, moving art closer to abstraction and winning tremendous freedom for the next generation of artists.
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