#30×30 Day 25 : Van Gogh and Gauguin, in Their Own Words

“There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it. And the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”

“Real painters do not paint things as they are, they paint them as they themselves feel them to be.”

“Great things do not happen by impulse, but as a succession of small things linked together.”

“I put my heart and my soul into my work and have lost my mind in the process.”

~ Vincent van Gogh, 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890

“In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.”

“There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.”

“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”

“Many people say that I don’t know how to draw because I don’t draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?”

~ Paul Gauguin, 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903