Artist

Interview with Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin

To Vincent van Gogh: Why did you cut off your ear; what was going through your head? Do you blame the absinthe?

Vincent van Gogh: As some of my biographers have indicated, I had emotional and psychological problems since I was a child. I was, for example, "highly emotional and lacked self-confidence," ("Vincent van Gogh: Biography"). Therefore, it should really come as no surprise that I exhibited signs of mental illness as an adult. And besides, what do you care? My greatest works of art exist because I was crazy. As one biographer states of my work: "all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide," (Pioch). It sometimes takes mental anguish and spiritual pain to generate...
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