From Van Goh's pen

                      "We spend our whole lives in unconscious exercise of the art of

                                  expressing our thoughts with the help of words."

                                "There is no blue without yellow and without orange."

                       Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland on March 30, 1853.During his brief career he sold one painting. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful: dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

                         Although Van Gogh is mainly recognized for his vibrant use of color, his drawings are exceptional because his representation of figures, light and landscape can be appreciated in their own right without the color to distract the eye.

Quay with men unloading Sand barges

                                                            Woman with her hair loose

                                                                    Landscape with trees

                                                                        Edge of a wood

                                                     Woman with a wheelbarrow at night

                                                        Woman pianist and a violinist

                                                                   Winter Garden

                                                            Woman with head in hands

However, as he describes,in many of his letters, he also used drawing as an outlet for his depression. The following excerpt about Van Gogh’s drawing comes from a letter Vincent wrote in 1880, at the age of 27, to his brother Theo.

“Well, and yet it was in these depths of misery that I felt my energy revive and I said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall set to work again with my pencil, which I had cast aside in my deep dejection, and I shall draw again, and from that moment I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me, and now I am in my stride and my pencil has become slightly more willing and seems to be getting more so by the day. My over-long and over-intense misery had discouraged me so much that I was unable to do anything.”

He also quoted,

                              "I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate."

Due to Van Gogh's extreme enthusiasm and dedication to first religion and then art coupled with the feverish pace of his art production many believe that mania was a prominent condition in Van Gogh's life. However, these episodes were always followed by exhaustion and depression and ultimately suicide. Therefore, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder or manic depression makes sense with the accounts of these episodes in Van Gogh's life.

Dr. Gachet, Van Gogh's physician, was thought to have treated his epilepsy with digitalis. This prescription drug can cause one to see in yellow or see yellow spots. This may have been one of the reasons why Van Gogh loved this color.

As I study his sketches, mulling over their form and  extreme austere beauty, punctuated with a sense of motion and fluidity, I am disturbed by the fact that such genius stemmed not from  inspiration but rather from profound grief and is not a reflection of his extra ordianry genius but a dark echo of his madness.