Ellen Forney Quotes

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.

I always liked the Van Gogh story because I was terribly involved in that.

We shot that in all the real places where Van Gogh worked.

I've always been really fascinated by Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh was impulsive.

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.

Vincent Van Gogh, who said to the hat salesman, I like it, but it keeps sliding over my ear. Never got a dinner!

Starry, starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze reflect Vincent's eyes of china blue.

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

I have many favorite artists... Van Gogh as one, but he didn't really sing a lot!

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.

Art is a liaison between some sort of deranged mentality and others who are not going through it.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.

It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.