Vincent Van Gogh: Quote of the day by Vincent Van Gogh: “I assure you that there’s a lot involved in compositions with figures. … It’s like weaving… you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.”
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who worked as an art dealer, a teacher, and a lay preacher before turning to art in his late twenties.In about ten years, he created more than 2,000 works that are still popularly known today, including the Sunflowers and The Starry Night.He sold very little in his lifetime and died at 37. Today his letters, mostly to his brother Theo, are as loved as his paintings and do include profound words that continue to be relevant even today.Once he talked about a profound idea that most of us like to believe: that good work comes from a flash of inspiration, but on the contrary, real life rarely works that way.Behind almost anything that works well, there is a quiet kind of effort nobody appreciates, when you hold so many small pieces in your head at once and not let any of them slip.That is the beauty of having an inspiration, one that does not come in a day but is a collection of little things over the years.
Quote of the day
I assure you that there’s a lot involved in compositions with figures. … It’s like weaving… you must control and keep an eye on several things at once
Vincent van Gogh
What does the quote mean?
Van Gogh was 29 and still teaching himself to draw and paint. This quote describing ths idea famously copmes from Van Gogh’s letters which he wrote to Theo, where he describes a watercolour with many figures, “the last summer guests on the beach,” and plans a snowy scene of a peasant funeral.Through his words he beazutifully describes the idea of multitasking, just like how in a loom the threads must stay separate and in order, yet together they form one cloth. A painter has to do the same.“Compositions with figures” means pictures with several people in them. Each person needs the right pose, size and place, and each must relate to the others, the light and the background. If you fix one thing and forget another, the whole picture can fall apart, so even though the idea of multitasking is beautiful in itself, it is also a though one to manage.The quote belongs to Vincent Van Gogh, according to the Denver Art Museum, and was originally written in a letter Van Gogh wrote to Theo, marked 271 in the Van Gogh Museum’s online edition and number 236 in the older English translation by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger.The wording of the letters varies because they were originally written in Dutch and then translated, and although they may differ slightly, the meaning has hardly changed.
How are his words relevant today?
We often say “multitasking,” but Van Gogh describes something different. He doesn’t jump between tasks every few seconds; in fact, he gives complete attention to one piece of work while keeping all its parts in mind.Even today, we can see this in a teacher planning a lesson, a developer working through a large codebase, a parent managing a household, or a student writing a thesis. The work feels difficult because it is not easy to hold several things together, but struggling with complexity doesn’t mean you lack talent. It is just the beauty of juggling between things beautifully.
