Richard Kendall > Quotes

“(p. 133) Van Gogh's need to create "a more exalting and consoling nature" is also expressed by his desire to combine his orchards into diptychs and triptychs, religiously charged forms of presentation that are inextricably tied to church interiors. Works of this kind were also familiar to Van Gogh from Japanese printmaking, in which two or three woodcuts often constitute a single scene -- he himself owned a number of such multiple-block prints, some with depictions of trees in blossom. The association with both religion and utopian Japan lends idealistic overtones to Van Gogh's idea to present his own work in this way.”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature

“(p. 32) In the early 1880s, Van Gogh wrestled with religion (and with his father as its representative), and the demolition of Nuenen's old church tower symbolized this struggle. Van Gogh regarded the demolition as the destruction of the church as an institution, but not of faith as such. Faith, asserted Van Gogh, could manage perfectly well without the institution: "And now this ruin says to me how a faith and religion moldered away, although it was solidly founded — how, though, the life and death of the peasants is and always will be the same, springing up and withering regularly like the grass and the flowers that grow there in that churchyard.... Religions pass, God remains" [507].”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature

“(p. 129) When Van Gogh began in September 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy to entertain ideas of returning to the north, he wrote to Theo: "You know that I came the south and threw myself into work for a thousand reasons. To want to see another light, to believe that looking at nature under a brighter sky can give us a more accurate idea of the Japanese way of feeling and drawing. Wanting, finally, to see this stronger sun, because one feels that without knowing it one couldn't understand the paintings of Delacroix from the point of view of execution, technique, and because one feels that the colors of the prism are veiled in mist in the north. All of this remains somewhat true" [801].”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature

“(p.62) Van Gogh came to realize in Nuenen that color could be a means of expression in its own right. Later, in France, based on his observation and experience of the color theories of Impressionist like Monet and Pissarro and Post-Impressionists like Seurat and Gauguin, he developed a quite radical, very bright palette that had little to do with naturalism. For some time, too, he tried to work from his imagination. Despite all this, he continued to believe that the direct study of nature was a sine qua non for a contemporary artist. Artists could never study nature enough. They constantly had to "grind away at it. And whatever imagination could achieve, to Van Gogh nature remained the ultimate source of inspiration: "The greatest, most powerful imaginations have also made things directly from reality that leave one dumbfounded" [537].”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature

“(p. 59) In a letter to Theo he wrote around 28 October 1885, Van Gogh explained at great length how he saw nature and how he tried to use color to express an enormous diversity of mood. Van Gogh studied nature (and the landscape), he wrote, "so as not to do anything silly" [537]. He did, though, reserve the freedom not to work exactly from nature, not to follow it "slavishly", when it came to color, and to use different colors, for "COLOUR EXPRESSES SOMETHING IN ITSELF. One can't do without it; one must make use of it. What looks beautiful, really beautiful — is also right.”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature