Vincent van Gogh

Artist statement

I paint because I cannot help it — colour is the language I trust more than my own words. My work is built up in thick, deliberate strokes, the paint laid on wet and direct so that each mark stays visible: I want the hand and the hour to remain in the picture, not be smoothed away. My subjects are the ordinary ones — wheatfields under a heavy sun, a chair, a pair of worn boots, the faces of people who work the land. In them I look for the feeling underneath the thing. I exaggerate the colour and let it carry the emotion: yellows that almost burn, blues that ache, a contrast pushed until it sings rather than merely describes. Technique, for me, is not polish but pressure. I work quickly, often outdoors, chasing the light before it turns, and I let the rhythm of the brush echo the movement of cypresses, of stars, of a sky that will not hold still. What I am after is consolation — to make something that touches another person the way music does, plainly and without explanation.