One day she asked him, as he was preparing to attack a new canvas, "how can you be sure that the spot you choose will come out right on the canvas?"Vincent thought for a moment and replied, "If I want to be active I must not be afraid of failures. When I see a blank canvas staring at me with certain imbecility, I just dash something down."
"You certainly do dash. I never saw anything grow as fast as your canvases."
"Well I have to. I find paralysing the state of a blank canvas which says to me, 'You don't know anything!' "
"You mean its a sort of a challenge."
"Exactly. The blank canvas stares at me like an idiot, but I know it is afraid of the passionate painter who dares, who once and for all has broken the spell of that 'you cannot.' life its self turns towards a man an infinite vacant, discouraging, hopelessly blank side on which nothing is written, Margot, no more than on this blank canvas."
"Yes Doesn't it"
"But the man of faith and energy is not frightened by that blankness; he steps in, he acts, he builds up, he creates, and in the end the canvas is no longer blank, but covered with the rich pattern of life."
*Taken from "Lust for Life" (1934) by Irving Stone a famous book based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. This is an author that I recently discovered who mostly wrote beautifull biographical novels.
Image: Van Gogh "Cafe Terrace at Night."
3 comments:
I MUST look this up! I have not read this book, and am a huge fan of Vincent's ...thanks!
I found the book in my Dad's library, and stole it, hehehe, first edition too.
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