The text of Mr. Feng Zikai's "Van Gogh Life" is very elegant, and it is really enjoyable to read. Van Gogh's life is familiar, but it doesn't prevent me from reading it in one sitting.
The book says that there are two types of artists: first, they are purely "artists" or "technicians" who can only look at his works and do not have to know how his personality lives; second, not only the artist or the technician, but also a "person" who cannot leave his "life" and only look at his "works". The Impressionist painter Monet, who pursued light and shadow, belonged to the former, and Van Gogh belonged to the latter.
Sure enough, Van Gogh was painting with his life.
Everything he did in his life, what he looked at and felt, was to gather energy and then put it on the canvas, thus achieving his extraordinary achievements. "Van Gogh's works are all the distress, sorrow, anger, memory, joy, and active discovery of his feverish career, and they are all records of life dyed with blood."
A family of devout priests in the Netherlands gave birth to a religious seed, Van Gogh. Naturally, he has had a sacrificial spirit since he was a child. When he was young, he liked to dive into the embrace of nature, lean over and contemplate. This invisibly contains the temperament of an artist.
At the age of eight, he revealed his genius for painting. However, his impoverished family and environment limited him, and he was sent to an apprenticeship at an uncle's art merchandise store. The apprentice was very strange, he pointed fingers at the famous paintings in the store, and sneered at the people who came to the store to buy paintings at high prices. The world does not know, in fact, it is not that he is strange, he just knows the true meaning of art in his heart.
At that time (late nineteenth century), because of the high call for "scientific omnipotence", the European art world was also full of realism, artists had cool heads, and artistic works were objectified, especially in the painting world. Impressionist painters, led by Monet, depicted the shapes, light, and colors in front of them in a photographic way without any enthusiasm (of course, Monet's paintings were also first-class). It was popular for a while, filling the emptiness of pre-era romanticism. However, things must be reversed, and Impressionism will eventually reach the point where naturalism is exhausted.
Water Lily Monet
Some prescient artists have shown a passion for subjectivism when people are still enthusiastic about the objective art of Impressionism, and some have even become fanatical, especially "crazy", van Gogh is one. Van Gogh never received a material reward from the world in his lifetime, and shortly after his death, his works were admired and sold at sky-high prices, objectively proving the forerunner and frontier of his artistic awakening.
Such a child, who was not seen and who was burdened with the mission of art, must not stay long in his uncle's art store, and he was dismissed. His loving father gave him some advice and asked his uncle to take him to the london art store branch. He despised the painting world there even more, and when he first entered the store, he got into a disagreement with his colleagues, and six weeks later, he had a big quarrel with the manager, and then he rolled up and left.
After losing his job this time, he did not have the face to go back to see his parents, so he found a teacher position in a poor primary school in London. The principal asked him to collect the tuition fees of the poor children, and he reluctantly accepted some of them for the first time, and the second time he could not bear to open his mouth anyway. Witnessing the misery of the slums, he mourned that he had returned empty-handed, and the headmaster dismissed him.
Instead, his father sent him to a Belgian university to study theology. He cared about his father's hard work and worked extra hard. And excessive hard work made him deranged, often writing letters full of paper to send to relatives and friends; sometimes wandering day and night in the slums, throwing his watches and gloves into the church's joy box; sometimes enthusiastically preaching to the laborers, caring for the sick laborers, sleeping and forgetting food for them, completely disregarding their own emaciation and poverty... The father of the believer rewarded him for all his goodness, but was concerned about his son's health, so he came and brought him home.
After returning home, Van Gogh's heart was still overflowing with sympathy and sorrow for the poor. With nowhere to vent, he thought of throwing it on the canvas. So, taking advantage of his parents' lack of preparation, he escaped from home and arrived in The Hague in the southern Dutch province, where he studied under a local painter. The painter, as was the custom of the time, asked him to start with plaster drawing, and after a few days of patience, he angrily broke the plaster, pushed down the easel, and flew away.
The Almighty Father is his deep understanding and loyal protector. He complied with Van Gogh's will and provided him with the expenses to let him study painting on his own. Since then, he has taken his enthusiasm as a teacher, pouring out his feelings and thoughts on the canvas, becoming a school of his own and becoming a natural one. At that time, he used miners, laborers, and farmers as his subjects. He had used his religious heart to bow down and preach to these people, see doctors, and give alms, and at this time, his overflowing sympathy and sorrow finally found a channel of circulation. He painted their poignant souls with a paintbrush.
Suddenly, his father died. The guardian star disappeared, and Van Gogh was almost in a desperate situation. Fortunately, his dear brother Timo took over the task of caring for him and did not abandon his post until the end of Van Gogh's life.
He followed his brother to Paris. His exuberant enthusiasm met the red sun and blue sky in the south, and burst out a fiery creative flame. The number of works in the following two years accounted for about three-quarters of all French paintings in the nineteenth century! He vowed to change the moribund state of the Parisian painting world and create a Renaissance for France.
However, as time passed, he began to dislike the natural beauty of Paris too weak to stimulate his enthusiasm anymore, so he followed the sun all the way south to embrace the sun lover.
The younger brother tolerated his toss infinitely, settling him in Al on the Mediterranean side of the sunny sea, constantly supplying him with living expenses and paint canvases. The unrestrained Van Gogh stood under the sun lovers, surrounded by golden sunflowers, ecstatic. In stark contrast to the warm sun, it is the southerners' cold treatment of him. No one paid attention to his genius paintings, and no one was willing to pay a penny for his paintings.
The genius Van Gogh ignored all this. Look at his unsentimental look:
In the summer of Ar, every day the red sun is empty, and there are no clouds to cover it. Van Gogh, who was born in the north, naturally felt pain and fatigue in his body. However, during sunrise, he never stayed at home, always going to the shadowless countryside outside the city, immersed in the production. He called the sun "King"! In the production, the hat is taken off to show his desire for the Sun King.
"Ah, the beautiful midsummer sun! It rattled my head! People say I'm crazy, but why am I crazy? ”
Van Gogh, under Al's sun, was "turning fire to fire" and was about to burn him to death soon.
Van Gogh painted sunflowers under the scorching sun of the southern country, and he hoped that his friends would share his joy, and he even wanted painters with the same ideas and technical ideas to come here to "live together" and "make together", so that on the one hand, they could avoid the coercion of material shortage, on the other hand, for artistic problems, they could work together to solve them.
His favorite cohabitant was Gauguin. The late Gao Ge was a French post-impressionist painter and a peculiar fanatic, who later wandered to some semi-civilized islands in the south to live a primitive life and paint in the style of primitive people. Van Gogh and he met in Paris and were like-minded painters.
Gauguin could not help him from luring him out by letter, and when Van Gogh's brother expressed his willingness to pay for him to go south, he did come south. They rely on each other and create many good works.
After the initial honeymoon period, the two began to have different opinions and clashed. Van Gogh, who already had a nervous disorder, for some small things, picked up the wine glass and smashed it at Gauguin, and Gauguin fled in a hurry. The next day Van Gogh returned to normal and apologized to Gauguin. But Gauguin knew that his seizures were not once or twice, so he wrote to Van Gogh's brother and prepared to return to Paris.
On this day, Gauguin was walking, when he suddenly heard footsteps behind him, only to see Van Gogh wielding a razor again, and Gauguin ran away. As a result, the frenzied Van Gogh danced with a razor and cut off one of his own ears. But before he could finish, he picked up his ears from the ground, wrapped them in paper, and sent them to his neighbors. The neighbor's hostess thought he had brought a Christmas present, and when she opened it, it turned out to be a bloody ear! Almost fainted.
He was admitted to a madness sanatorium. After that, he and Gauguin never saw each other again.
During his hospitalization, painting still did not stop. Unable to paint outdoor landscapes of grass and trees, he would paint courtyards, wards, or ask nurses to be models. He also asked his brother to buy prints, brocade paintings, photographs and reproductions of everyone's works, as natural objects, and used pens as paintings to talk about masturbation. Subsequently, after his condition stabilized, he was allowed to come and go freely. The mountainous nature of Saint-Rémy, where the sanatorium is located, is different from the natural landscape of the plains of Al, and he praises the place very much, and "Olive Grove" and "Valley" are the two masterpieces of that time.
External life has settled down, but deep inner sorrow is still eroding there. Since the onset of his illness, he has been in a coma for more than a hundred days, his friend Gauguin has left in anger, his relatives have been repeatedly troubled, and now he is in a lonely nursing home, and he is afraid that he will be forgotten by everyone in the world. Saint-Rémy's magnificent nature deepened his sense of sadness.
Soon after, he was sent by his brother to a small village near Paris, Auver, which was also very scenic and where Cézanne also lived. It was the beginning of the spring evening, the scenery was pleasing to the eye, and Van Gogh was enthusiastically thrown into the enthusiasm for creation.
And his too weak body gradually could not support this strong will, and the epilepsy was approaching again. His passionate love for art, his helpless shame in the material embarrassment of life, his endless shame for the help of his loved ones, and the confusion of his soul, he thought of suicide. He remembered that his father had said:
Death is easier than life, and life is more painful than death.
Two months into the village, he began a suicide plan.
On a clear morning in late July, Van Gogh went out with his painting tools. Until noon, the owner of the apartment who took care of him did not wait for him to return. After three o'clock in the afternoon, Fang saw him stumbling home, his clothes stained with blood, and his body was already injured.
It turned out that he had brought a gun early in the morning and was ready to shoot it into his lungs in the arms of nature, but his wrist was not accurately grasped and he was mistakenly hit in the leg. Although not fatal, his desire for death was blazing, "Sorrow will continue forever!" ”
The last two days were spent in the company of my brother. The day he left was July 29, 1890, and Van Gogh was 37 years old. A few months later, his younger brother Theo followed.
On the day of the funeral, the sun was dim, his beloved sun lover could not stretch out his hand, and the damp dirt hair also made a desolate sound. Only the sunflowers at the edge of the tomb, leaning in the direction of the sun, bloomed with scorching flowers.
Van Gogh was born to paint. Although he has been poor all his life, nameless and unprofitable, he has gone all the way to the south, followed the sun, bursts of artistic enthusiasm toward the sun, and has never hesitated to shrink back in his life. He is pure and true, the times have treated him coldly, and time will eventually see him.
<h1>The sun is silent, but knows its loneliness. In the depths of time, he must be sleeping with the sun lover. </h1>