Van Gogh has become one of the hero-figures of the 20th century culture. His life has been the subject matter of plays, novels and films: more books have been written about him than any other artists of our time. His paintings adorn the walls of most of the great museums and galleries of the western world. He has become the epitome of the romantic artist despised and rejected in his own lifetime, struggling against adversity and ultimately achieving posthumous fame. He has been transformed, as it were into the St Francis of a secular religion.

I have chosen Van Gogh as my artist, because he inspires me. I love the way he incorporates pattern into his paintings and this gave me the idea of doing patterns in the background of my impasto drawings. However Van Gogh takes the treatment of pattern one step further; the backgrounds in his paintings are very dramatic and often contrast with the wonderful colour and light effects of the foreground eg. The Church at Auvers 1890 Oil on Canvas. In this painting the lines which outline the shapes and angles of the different parts of the building seem to vibrate with movement.

As well, the soil appears to be straining against the foundations of the East windows. There is so much energy depicted in this painting that it almost seems that this church has settled on the earth like some primitive monster. The quick flickering brush strokes which Van Gogh uses for the paths, the grass and flowers are decorative as well as descriptive and form a striking contrast to the great blue mass of the sky which swirls above the scene. There is also a link between the yellowish brown tones of the foreground with the splashes of burnt orange on the roof of the church and repeated in the tiles of the cottage on the left.

I love this dramatic contrast within his paintings and his portraits for example in the portrait of Marguerite Gachet at the piano 1890 the figure of the girl is painted in bold swirls in comparison to the “spotted” background and the short thick brushstrokes placed side by side in the foreground. There seems to be a certain ugliness in the hands with the paint laid on thick where as the face is more subtle and true to life.

Van Gogh’s mental visions were skilfully, excitedly and expressively transferred to canvas in a swirling fiery dance of riotous colour. His art to me is like a thrilling revelation, but to him it was the frantic outpouring of his harassed mind. Van Gogh’s output of work over his brief painting career of ten years was enormous and generally he worked with fanatical rapidity. He was concerned with more than the outer appearance of things he was interested in the essential of inherent character as it affected him mentally and emotionally and he attempted to express this sensation in paint.

Another painting of Van Gogh’s is the Wheatfield with Cypresses, this painting was done on July 1889 and done with Oil on canvas and is 72.5×91.5cm (281/2×36in). This view of the Wheatfield outside the village of Eygalieres, east of Saint Remy, seems to have appealed deeply to Van Gogh, there are four other versions of this particular view, one of them is a drawing. This particular painting of it was painted just before Van Gogh’s fourth nervous collapse on 8th July. Although the tangle of clouds and their fierce undulations a feature of all three paintings seems to indicate stress, the rest of the landscape is powerfully lyrical rather than hysterical in feeling. The composition is unusual in that the dark shape of the cypress tree is much further to the right of the canvas than might have been expected in a more conventional arrangement. We can see how he laid his oil colours on to the canvas in short heavily laden strokes catching the light and making it sparkle.

For Van Gogh, he has absorbed the lessons of Impressionism and of Seuret’s pointillism. He liked the technique of painting in dots and strokes of pure colour, but under his hands it became something rather different from what these Paris artist’s had meant it to be. Van Gogh used individual brushstrokes not only to break up the colour but also to convey his own excitement. In one of his letters from Aries he describes his state of inspiration when “the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without being aware of working and the strokes come with a sequence and coherence like words in speech or a letter.” He painted as other men write and he laid on the colour thick just as a writer who underlines his words.

Van Gogh was not only concerned with correct presentation, he used colours as forms to convey what he felt about the things he painted and what he wished others to feel. He did not care much for what he called “stereoscopic reality”, that is to say the photographically exact picture of nature. Van Gogh wanted his painting to express what he felt and if distortion helped him achieve this aim he would use distortion. Van Gogh had felt that by surrendering to their visual impressions and by exploring nothing but the optical qualities of light and colour. Art was in danger of losing that intensity and passion through which alone the artist can express his feeling to his fellow men.

This Dutch artist’s intensely emotional art and impetuous life were inseparably interwoven. Due to an abnormal temperament and in the end epilepsy, his worldly life was doomed to failure but his passionately fervent art the emotional outpouring of his soul in terms of paint will live forever. Most people now a days know some of these paintings; The Sun Flowers, The Empty Chair, The Cypresses and some of these paintings have become very popular in coloured reproductions and can be seen in many a simple room. That is exactly what Van Gogh wanted. He wanted his pictures to have the direct and strong affect of the coloured Japanese prints he admired so much.