I used to buy some art books, until I fell away from it, for a few reasons: mostly the aspect of the extremely dead, robotic prose style, you know: and whole aspect of, in say medieval Catholic Mary art, the interplay between the skeptical writer who doesn’t believe in beauty and the celibate in an all-male order who doesn’t believe in talking to any girls ever no matter what, painting/talking about girls (or specks of paint on their face)—and if you don’t get into that you’re not an extremist; you’re supposed to be an extremist: your life has nothing to do with your own time, or ordinary lived non-robotic experience…. And the other issues: the artists usually being very unhappy and sometimes very unaware in a larger sense (unhappiness-making: even among artists not fascinated with the tortured body of Christ, this is often the case—photographers shooting skeletons dangling from sky-high swastikas: hoping against unacknowledged hope that Hitler Messiah of the Nihilists will make all men even as I am, truly full of misery and despair…. O, what have we learned from our studies?), and very often the price point.

And then there’s the issue of how visual art is literally often from the time when most people Could Not read: but it is Laboriously made exclusive, far from the fleshy, squishy ones, and not as an option: you have no choice. Maybe if you’re an unartistic maggot you have a choice. Go fuck yourself, though.

But I realize now though though the academic doesn’t care about beauty, beauty matters; and also for all the faults of intellectual culture, popular culture is, for better or worse, derivative—always has been, always will be—and the two aren’t really separate….

So, that’s what the library is for.

…. (takes the book off the library shelf)

Random points:

One. Wow, I am so glad that I decided to get this from the library. It would have been expensive, bro; my enjoyment would not have been as much as the price. But this way it’ll be ok.
Two. The title is terrible. Someone put this man in a copywriting class; don’t let him in a museum for a few days—let his head cool down.
Three. The writer of the words is not a girl like I’d planned.

But! Other points:
One. It’s free!
Two. It covers his whole life, not just the beginning or just the end.

So, yeah. Okay. (places book in trunk) (closes trunk)

…. Well, the text is certainly suitably inappropriate, as expected. “They say that beauty can save the world, save a life. I had an opportunity to test this theory many years ago, when, only twenty-one and still a student at the….”

JUST KIDDING, fuckers! 😮‍💨

“My name is John Smith. I work for the Institute of National Beauty in Capital City-Place. I lecture the children. Last year, I was given a sabbatical from my normal, everyday job, to do something ~really~ boring and precision-oriented. I had to….”

…. But I can see myself taking pictures so I can get a few print-outs at Staples, before I give it back.

…. Maybe if Vincent had recovered from his mental illness—nobody really knows what it was, at least to satisfy a modern diagnostician, although to me you can’t separate suicide from mental illness the way that you can separate mental illness from suicide; dying by suicide happens because you’re not well, and not because you’re not well on the surface level, say you sprained your ankle or something but are otherwise cheerful and optimistic—he would have not only not killed himself but, I mean, obviously painted more pictures, but also enjoyed himself and what he had earned more, not persuaded everybody except for his younger brother Theo not to support him, given up the vain quest to be an unhappy artist, you know.

(shrugs) I mean, my dad said he’d never read Ernest Hemingway because he died by suicide (not how he put it, my dad voted for the stinker, and isn’t good about being respectful when it doesn’t suit his fancy), but I just think that’s stigma, you know; not a word I like to bandy about, and certainly in this case it only hurt my father and not the dead writer, I imagine. I don’t know, I read one of Ernest’s books years and years ago and I didn’t enjoy it; “and then I stripped naked and wrestled a bear while my lover oo-ed and ah-ed”, but, whatever, right. I don’t recommend killing yourself just because I don’t like one of your books, (he’d have been dead by that time anyway), but aside from the issue that you may well cause yourself lasting psychic harm into your next life by choosing to die by suicide—you know, it’s also none of my business, any more than your decision to consume factory farmed animal corpses is, you know. (shrugs)

Anyway, his work certainly isn’t “offensive” in the “I am a suffering artist and now I’m going to take it out on you”, sense, you know—it’s almost like the old old-wave thing, it reminds me of, really; they sang happy songs even when they’re wanted to die, you know. Like say, if Roy Orbison had died by suicide, (he didn’t; it was medical); I suppose probably the last song he would have sang in the studio before slouching off to the bathroom to shoot himself would have been some kind, sweet romantic old song about how “I love you”, and then, “Why’s he crying? That was a great take.” “Oh, I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it anymore!” (bang) “Fuck! What was that!”—certainly there’s the aspect of clean up in suicide, clean up that the one who dies doesn’t have to do, obviously…. But I don’t know. Was Vincent a self-defeating artist…. Or was he too Christian/monastic…. Too self-sacrificing? “I can’t let them know the pain I feel…. (crying, painting)…. I must create beauty…. (crying, painting)…. I must not let anyone feel, what is inside…. (face in hands)—Aaaahhh!” (gun)

But then, Anne Sexton and Kurt Cobain both also killed themselves; both of them, Anne comparatively so for her time, Kurt for both his time and our own, were “angst-y” people who did ~not~ hide their feelings, even if they were disordered, if you like.

(shrugs) Goosecap doesn’t know, this time, children.

…. (shakes head) People certainly say strange things about art: this one’s good; that one’s bad; it’s got to be a certain way; it can’t be what YOU like, that you like, right…. (shakes head)

…. Some of them are sad, after all…. Although at least they were only eating potatoes, of course….

…. Anyway: back to the intro text—I’m not as ascetic as a Buddhist, to recommend lightly turning away and ignoring the whole ‘best artist vs fake love’ story (while jamming to BTS, of course— ~~now someone has to make a BTS/Vincent van Gogh montage video, right~~…. I think you should enjoy the story, but it is just a story. The average art critic wedges a poker up his ass like a character out of “The Catcher in the Rye”, when presumably something about the image was meant to be happy, appealing, in either a ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ way, right. Apparently some artists enjoy imagining that only three out of ten thousand viewers, “really get it”, I mean, you draw something that you don’t think people in your own time or whatever get, go ahead, maybe that’s your life’s work; but some artists just try to assimilate an interaction with beauty to masculinism, you know: the denial of beauty; the denial of life, really…. 🧛‍♂️

…. For me it’s entertaining, that’s how I have to see it, how Mr. Knowledge reacts to the blatant aggressive Victorian intellectual sexism directed at Vincent’s female relative who basically preserved all his work, you know. Real anti-woman stuff, and he reacts by this subtle-almost-exists crap; no wait, I can see it, (magnified 1000 times) No…. (magnified 10000 times) wait, wait: maybe…. Like, you live in another country and someone drops a bomb on your house; the U.N. is like: interesting; you know, normally when that happens, it’s not ok: interesting; curious; mysterious….

(a woman is arguing with a sexist)
Mr Knowledge be like: Honey, honey. (touches her) Dear: that’s not how we do it; we don’t tell intellectuals they’re wrong. THIS is how you do it. (addresses man) Now, look: I’m a white man you’re a white man. She’s not a white man: let’s examine her. Now, maybe I like her and maybe you don’t…. So, it’s mysterious.

The academy can be a real trip. It really can be, you know….

…. Vincent wasn’t Irish, but two of the things Ireland is known for producing are alcoholics and priests, and Vincent was a former lay preacher who lived with an alcoholic prostitute. Sometimes the extremes exist together, overlap. Reading about and experience of alcoholics can confirm this. The stereotype that comes from stuffing down the mention, and sometimes the person, of them with as little thought as possible, can be deceiving, although they can certainly be very unstable personalities. Too bad there were no Al-Anon meetings for Vincent in the 1800s; I think they date to the 1950s. Christian teaching by itself isn’t all vain, but in Victorian times there was more of a conquest and conformity film caked over what truth was there; not many priests going around in the late 1800s saying, Tell me about your experience living with an alcoholic prostitute; what’s that like for you, ~you know?

…. A lot of it does seem to be dark, dark in color. You see that one Dorothea Lange photo and you don’t learn that her photos don’t all hurt your face, you know; you see that one Van Gogh, you can’t see him with the peasants instead of the stars. The ‘great scholar’ portrays him as a nationalist, but I can’t help but wonder if he turned away from the cities to the bleak world of the Victorian peasant world out of a sense of…. Happiness-lessness, you know. And while he doesn’t blatantly, openly share his antipathy or unhappiness or anything the way a modern grunge-y guy might: “I’m drawing the logo for Skull Records; we’re going to put a skull, some blood; I even thought to….” But I mean, even those corny old Everly Brothers songs, for instance, betray a sort of giving-up-happiness at times. “What to do? My lover’s plane blew up. Now I’m blue.” Blue? No no no: brown…. Brown is one of the only truly necessary colors…. God thinks we’re all dirt bags, you know…. (painting shit brown)….

…. (The Potato Eaters) But maybe it IS grunge, you know. Maybe it’s socialist propaganda. “And we’re gonna KEEP being ugly—no no: look at me! LOOK at me!—we’re gonna KEEP being ugly, until we get what we want!” 😹

“So you’re going to the business meeting like that?” “Yeah should I change.” “Yeah, go ahead and do that.” “Ok. Cool.” I wonder what stupid thing the ‘great scholar’ will say, you know. To an Uber-Mann, though, even the lowliest European peasants were beautiful supermen; we can almost imagine that they can FLY…. ~Bro. 😹

…. I mean, I suppose I sound like an ass, right. Commies would call me an ass. Certainly if you see an overworked, underdressed, older peasant woman as beautiful—‘we’re all beautiful now’, or whatever—good for you. I just wonder if that’s how he really felt, you know…. I mean, we talk about the poor having a culture, either to punish or laud them, but the heroes of popular media are rich. Nobody says, “I’m so happy to be poor!”, and congratulates his friend on his low income, right. (His PURE income!). On a different if perhaps related note, Africans certainly have a culture or cultures, and some people probably prefer the style of life in their part of Nigeria or South Africa to any other place; in this sense, race isn’t exactly like poverty. And yet people do move from Africa to Paris, because really, we all want the same things some of the time, and we tend to see it in many of the same places. (shrugs) The European countryside wasn’t literally bombed to shit in the 1800s like Africa was, but it was a very urban and urbanized and urbanizing civilization; not a whole lot has changed, but if we are sure NOW that they are backwards in the countryside, they were even more sure then. Is painting the people overlooked by society to the exclusion of the ‘beautiful people’ a sign that you consider yourself worthy to be overlooked in your own turn, as less than? Is it a step on the road to killing yourself, this step down into the forgotten land?

…. (Mr Knowledge) ‘Art teaches us beauty, life, joy, art: for example, consider the Anglo Classic work from church times; “The Bloodied Savior”’. ~That’s incredibly depressing~ ‘Yes, well, nowadays, you have work from our local grunge artist, “The Murderer” ‘. ~Uh huh. Yes, he’s…. Scary, right. I’ll put it right over my bed. I’ll pay in cash…. Say, in the 19th century, weren’t there those frilly garden-party artists?~ ‘Ah, yes, like Van Gogh. The name rolls off the tongue; Van Gogh, Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s Van Goghs. He was male, you know. Here we have his master-work: “Pile of Potatoes.”’ ~Potatoes?~ ‘He was male.’ ~…. Potatoes??~

…. Sometimes I wonder if the identity of the classics are determined by a sort of mass hysteria of the intellectual class, you know. “(tears of joy, or, whatever) This made me feel terrible. It made me feel that life was empty, that I could not go on. (thrusts it on you) It will make you feel that way, too.”

…. It’s amazing how you can have two brothers with the same last name, and one gets a first name and other the last name, you know. Hierarchy. “The academy believes in hierarchy…. All of life should believe in hierarchy. Consign human choice, freedom, and all bliss to the fiery netherworld, boys!…. We here are doing the One Right Thing.”

But yeah, eventually he moved to Paris, right. Some of these paintings I look at them and they seem alright, you know, and then I read Mr. Knowledge go over them—who knows what he thinks, right, (does Knowledge think?), but by the end of a few paragraphs my new picture frames aren’t closer to being filled after all, lol….

…. But yeah, the Paris period is starting to look more like his Dutch early years than you might think, you know. (“Paris.”). “Interesting contrast of brown and black; truly the work of a male artist….”

…. Although some of it pretty, eventually he started painting flowers and things that might not make a skittish elitist lose their lunch; I hate to be like that but give me something, right…. “I’ll give you a topless five year old girl.” 😟

North Dakota: 👹

I hate to “North Dakota”, because they’re really over the top, you know: the executions will continue until people mellow out, but I really don’t think five year old girls should have been naked in the company of Vincent and his drunk prostitute girlfriend, or left alone at all. No child protective services in the 1880s, I’m guessing?

…. But eventually Paris happened for him. He painted sappy Victorian mothers, himself in contrasted painted selfies, Paris streets, places outside the urban limits seen with the eyes of the same city, still life paintings with color, not monochromatic brown things, right—“Paris” happened for him, like in a movie….

It’s easy to make fun of romantic movies, but…. I realize that my early childhood in what Gen Z and comedians have taken to calling the “late 1900s” was a long time ago, but I still remember very vaguely seeing this (VHS, lol) movie with my father and brother called “Forget Paris”—and to the critics maybe it was sappy romantic BS, but to my male relatives it was defs something they were watching with the promise of its being, “Fuck rom-coms”, right. I was maybe seven, maybe a little younger. (I’m guessing it wasn’t brand-spanking new when we watched it because it was on tape and I was old enough to remember.) I didn’t even know what “Paris” was, and I was already being told to forget it….

…. And I mean, Paris isn’t always mythology-Paris, right. I’m not sure I want to go there because I’m: (a) an American, and pretty attached to the English language, which especially in France, especially in PARIS, lol, is asking for abuse, (b) not a foodie, so we’re already starting to string the insults into longer threads, right, And!, (c) a vegetarian—French people are Uber-feminine, right: until we start to talk about not eating meat, basically. (Hint: French men, for better or for worse, on average are just as dick-y as all other men, right.)

But there’s going to Paris, and seeing the world with “Paris” eyes; not always identical things, right.

…. I mean, Paris is funny. In a lot of cultures, people don’t mind if you talk to your friend, having a real conversation, in English or whatever, and speak to the employee or whoever in Phrasebook-ese, you know, and I think in some parts of especially rural France it might be like that, (and I don’t mind when people talk to me in Phrasebook English, you know, people doing the grunt work, right), but I feel like in Paris it would be like, “I’ve been waiting all day to practice my insults on a [as I will be then, lol] prosperous American!” 👨‍🎨

But in France, and especially Paris, people feel envious if gods don’t love them better, you know; and you have to admire that—the total lack of begging God, you know…. It’s a feeling.

…. The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” is a heartbreaking cri de coeur of the meaninglessness of modern life, the soul-crushing nature of intel—modernity. Consider, for comparison, Van Gogh’s “Courting Couples in the Voyer d’Argenson Park in Asnières”. Don’t you find this picture disturbing?
—No.
Unsettling?
—What, you think I’m insecure? That I can’t see two couples standing near to each other in a pretty painting without—
You misunderstand my meaning; I am not TALKING about life: I’m AVOIDING it! When you do that, EVERYTHING is unsettling. Now, look closer; pretend you were suppressing an existential panic. Don’t you see how the—
—Oh, for fuck’s sake, you get PAID to make people hate themselves?
[—(snooty) Not very much!!]

…. “Trees and Undergrowth” is pure; “A Park in Spring”, fertile.

Mr. Knowledge’s comments are useless.

…. (flipping through book in anticipation) I wonder when it all started to go downhill, you know. I suppose suicidality can lurk beneath even the most brash happiness, like a water-monster beneath a boat, even if it is laughable to say that one listens to the Beatles or goes to nice French eateries in order to feel sad. It’s obviously not the happiness that’s the suicidal ideation. But happiness can be brief; it flowers, and fades away. If some strange trauma and unknown pain is beneath all that, well…. I mean, nice restaurants are for when you’re well, for enjoying your health. They don’t heal you, mentally any more than physically.

…. (“Self-portrait 42, 1887”) I wonder if he considered himself attractive. He certainly seems, not unhappy, but unenthused. It’s easier to consider one’s partner attractive than oneself, especially (probs not only, necessarily) for a man in normie culture, but I suppose one ought to consider oneself attractive, or else one cannot take good care of one’s face, while being in good spirits, you know. The literal (yet arguably not impolite, and if it’s impolite, fuck off) version of ‘loving yourself’—loving your face…. Vincent’s painted selfies seem kinda factual, though. “This is my face. Not marketing it very well; however, it’s ever so serene….” 🤔

…. I mean, some of them—I mean, some of them aren’t bad—but “Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1887”, looks ugly: not in technique in whatever, but just, like, he’s a non-speaking role in a movie, right~ “Ugly Man No. 4”. (N.B. It’s not the normal/famous one by that description, and you can see why. It’s on page 89 of ISBN 0-8109-6366-3).

You know, there’s that absence of marketing, that sense of, “this is who I’m presenting myself as”, you know.

…. Like, you know those AirUp commercials about the flavored water bottle? This is Joanne; she uses the product. This is Bob; he doesn’t. “Your loss, Bob.” Like sometimes, you’re an intellectual, you’re the Swiss guy with the rich doctor’s voice; sometimes, you’re Bob. “Your loss, Bob.” I feel like, before his death, Vincent was “Bob”, you know. I mean, he had potential; he wasn’t without talent…. But people looked at him, they saw “Bob”. A lot of Van Gogh fans are the same way; they don’t see that impinging on their happiness, you know; they see that as evidence of the lumprenproles of capitalism oppressing them, right. “So you’re good, then? You don’t need to change—you’re happy?” (drinking an unhealthy milkshake because he doesn’t know, that there’s another way) (exhausted) Yeah; I’m good. I’m gonna stay here. (beat) I feel awful. Life is bad.

…. I feel like a single brief sentence, perhaps two at most, or not even as much as that, about the differences between northern and southern France should have been in order. I cannot supply the sentence myself; sometimes many books and much knowledge goes into a very firm, compact, yet impressionist (lol) sentence, you know. Something about the difference to the psyche of Arles on the Mediterranean and Paris in the north would have been worth much (factually) unassailable piddling, you know.

…. “There’s nothing sexy about depression, Becca!”
~ Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season One

…. (girl threatens a fellow artist/girlfriend, who immediately leaves and takes off for another state as girl stumbles into brothel, slices off part of her ear)
(later, looking at self with bandaged ear)
(decides to take selfie with her head all fucked up)
(enter DA TWOLL) 🧌
(DA TWOLL notices girl’s latest selfie) 🤕
(DA TWOLL) “I feel like you’re the misunderstood genius of our time…. Bitch!”

Actually, it would have been a lot uglier than that, lol. 🐝

Bumble bumble.

…. “I have made portraits ~of a whole family.~

The one kid doesn’t look ~bad~ exactly, but he looks like the old kinda racist term, “street Arab”, like a child-thief from Dickens or something….

The other kid looks like he’s going to explode with ugliness. “Born smiling”? Ah, sure, sure…. I mean, he’s not smiling, and if that were me, I’d pay him to take it down.

And, again:

(1880s girl shows up with fucked-up face to make portraits “of the whole family”)
(the village militia is mustered to forcibly bear her away)

…. “Crab on Its Back”, 1888

Ten, fifteen years too early for Freud, unfortunately. That would have been funny. Would have gotten him locked up real quick, taken away from any sharp objects, for sure…. (Well, maybe. It’s a possibility.)

…. I think if Vincent had painted a giant tombstone during his little crisis, Mr. Knowledge would have been like (5 paragraphs: excellent technique) (one line or two) He’s obviously feeling optimistic and thinks he’s going to last a long time, as enduring as stone.

It’s like how dense can you get? There’s loyalty to the great artists of the great white race, and then there’s just…. Agent provacateur stuff, you know. “Educators SO dumb, Aunt Cynt, they all up and say….” You know, like: and who the fuck is he kidding? Can you imagine someone like Vincent needing help and someone like Mr. Knowledge being in charge of screening him? ~~Total fucking disaster, right. Get in the newspapers, right. (journalist, all excited) I heard something bad happened; I came as soon as I heard!

…. Interludes of relative calm, it’s true: perhaps not as long as he imagined—interspersed with periods of sliding downhill, not noticing it….

How’s it going, Vincent? Our 1880s psychiatry working for you? Of course, it won’t work for most people in the 2020s, either, but….
(Vincent) I’m fine. Not ill at all. Totally fine.

… While painting crazy shit—albeit not so much appearing that way to our post-grunge, post-1990s eyes, right…. Right? A reaper in the fields, Jesus Having A Rough Day, the Emperor Moth in the Forest of Despair…. I say we let him go home early, Doc. He’s obviously a West European artist—look at those brush strokes. What’s the worst that could happen?

…. (chipper voice) So remember, children, Vincent’s tragic self-inflicted fate and moronically under-served life by the larger community do nothing to detract from the fact that ~white people~ are the, best! 🦸🏻‍♂️ And especially, men!…. Do you kids think you’ll come back to the museum when you’re older, or will you dig up Indian graves instead?

Right: like art isn’t about life, children; what the actual fuck’s gotten into you? Art is about…. It’s like, you just gotta sing the song of cant, you know. It’s like being verbose, ~but without words~…. (little boy) Woh….

…. Wow, even the ones that seem ambiguous (maybe ~sometimes~ the Bible isn’t morbid, right), end up being about death, right. 36-37 seems way too early to think about death, you know…. Yeah, I don’t know, man….

But everyone’s in a different dream: a dream not always in the romantic sense, sometimes in the sense of an illusion, right…. I hate to reach for the dharmic cliche, right: just the idea that…. Vincent created his own little world, but in the end, it gobbled him up, so; well, that was his world.

…. Yeah, it’s like “Trees and Undergrowth” (1887), p. 74 vs “Undergrowth” (1889), p. 128: it’s like “Undergrowth (Things Are Okay)” and “Undergrowth (Life is shit…. Endless, endless shit)”, you know. That’s the impression I get….

Richard claims that the late picture I’m referring to imperfectly preserved, which is something worth noting—he says that the hues are a little darker, now than as painted, and the dark colors ARE a part of the piece’s sense of dread or unhappiness. Art book writers are very sensitive, however, and I wouldn’t bet that the two pictures I compared were colored at all similarly at any time; the differences are marked. And also, even in the form: the 1887 picture shows both trees and undergrowth about equally; the presence of the trees makes the picture seem like it has elements in it which are more complete, more noble. The 1889 work just showing the amorphous dark crap—I can’t think of another way to say that despite that sounding a little ethnocentric-colorist, right…. Just blah-meh dark amorphous shapes in the forest of dread, you know. Kinda messed up, almost…. You’d rather not ~feel~ the way that ~looks~, right?

…. It sounds like flattery, you know, what Richard is doing: the cultured flattery of the dead…. In a way it’s not a true currency, you know. He makes of him a man of marble….

…. And then there followed a period of quiet, and growing health, characterized by the feeling that, “I can make a positive change.”

“I can make a positive change….”

And then….

Bang!

Camera suddenly centers on the artist’s body, blood slowly pooling around his head. After a beat, a track from a rap album featuring a singer plays. Center on the body for a few beats, then, with the track still playing:

ROLL CREDITS.

(And then at the end of the credits, some bullshit, solemn quote to reassure people that you’re not laughing at the dead man because you didn’t romanticize his self-destruction, right. Because you didn’t portray him as fucking King Arthur, right—King Arthur as imagined by a sly English propagandist, or a naive child, basically.)

…. Sometimes I wonder which of the poets and painters’ reputation will survive the great un-naive-ing that everyone always assumes has already happened but is really like a soft breath of morning wind upon a mighty mountain, so entrenched is the idea of the status of the dead men in the minds in the majority, you know. Still, I think that Anne Sexton was a better poet than Hugh Auden, and obviously that’s the sort Vincent was—a freaky, self destructive “Anne” type person, you know. Obviously, even more obviously, the verbal prose attached to the pictorial poetry is all Auden, you know. The looming words of dead men who always kept their appointments, right. (shrugs)

So, there’s that.

…. So yeah.

Here in the living room, there’s Van Gogh—Starry Night, and next to it some relative of mine’s failed attempts at photo realism re: my dead grandparents. “I’m a bureaucrat, and this: this is art!” At least they didn’t put up that Dorothea Lange picture, right. “Okay, Stones or Beatles? I say, Beatles! Who’s your favorite: mine is Paul!”

Oh, the hazards of becoming famous….

Nevertheless, I can get behind some of these images, and I will take pictures of the following ones, and get at least some of them printed out, right:

—Vegetable Gardens and the Moulin de Blute-Fin on Montmartre (1887), p. 62
—Glass of Absinthe and a Carafe (1887), p. 67
—Restaurant at Asnières (1887), p. 71
—Courting Couples in the Voyer d’Argenson Park In Asnières (1887), p. 72
—Trees and Undergrowth (1887), p. 74
—A Park in Spring (1887), p. 75
—Field with Flowers near Arles (1888), p. 94
—The Harvest (1888), p. 98

So basically the Vincent that appeals is to me is either from well into his stay in the Paris region, mostly, (1887), and also some of his stuff in Arles, before he started to come unglued (1888), although for some reason the actual sea/coast pictures don’t appeal to me. I guess I don’t live close enough to the water, or have enough of a desire to be there, basically….

So yeah, he was a nut, but when he was well, he was quite lovely.

Written to accompany a touring exhibit of paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this book is mostly a discussion of the development of the artist's style and technique. It minutely examines the paintings in question, illuminating brushwork and color. ( )