VAN GOGH : Impressionist Painter of Emotional Brush

“Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly. –Van Gogh.

Road With Cypress and Star -by Van Gogh

There can be no more detailed explanation of the art of Van Gogh than what he said in his own words. The employment of the artistic skills is a complex one in a sense. The painter’s work is somehow to make a replica of the mental images he or she has made after observing a natural a scene or collection of the objects. An artist desires to share his or her experience with the viewers through the art. Thus the work of an artist builds a bridge between the viewers and the inner traffic that had run through the artist’s mind. Perhaps that is the neat duty of a true artist. Van Gogh wanted to observe his duty cleanly; and he did it. (Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons)



Here in the Road With Cypress and Star (1890, the last year of his life), Van Gogh’s art seems to be at its peak. In this painting, he would have intended to charge the canvass with emotional energy. And for creating the expressive effect, he applied variations in brush strokes, variations both in length and power. In his private life, Van Gogh had passed through a turbulent road that was enough to make him restless. In this painting, his feeling of the restlessness has crept out and had taken the route of expression through the brush strokes looking almost chaotic. We can witness this technique of using the hyperactive brush in his other works, too, where he had succeeded in creating wonderful variety in expressive textures.