“For some time there has been a popular notion that creativity, especially a high degree of creativity, and mental illness has much in common. In fact, the idea that “madness” and creative “genius” are related can be traced back to some of the early Greek philosophers. In recent years, some research findings have lent some support to the notion that various types of mental conditions are linked in interesting ways to creativity and that extraordinary creativity itself might predispose some individuals to certain types of mental illness.”(Reference 1)
Few artists have created a body of work that is so inseparable from the facts and myths of the artist's life and persona. Van Gogh's unrestrained passion and euphoric contemplation of life, nature, and art, his intense spirituality and religious ardour, his generous, zealous, and truthful temperament, and especially, his violent and mysterious ailments and suicide at age thirty-seven have all contributed to impacting and occasionally inaccurate theories that can shadow a precise understanding of the important painter. The time Van Gogh spent at Arles, St. Remy, and Auvers allowed Vincent to paint at a close to feverish pace, until he felt "broke and crazy" (L 513, July 1888). In the last two and a half years of his life he produced the highest-volume and most
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While Impressionists were admiring the colour and exquisiteness of the natural landscape, Van Gogh took a fundamentally different viewpoint. He chose to look inwards to ‘discover a form of self-expression’ that offered him a distinctly separate voice in a world that he looked at as both diffident and unsympathetic. It was this more independent search for a personal expressive truth that drove him on and ultimately paved the way for the Expressionist art forms of the 20th century that explored the inner landscape of the