Turning Sadness into Joy – Vincent van Gogh’s Life

Vincent van Gogh was a man of great determination. It seems like no matter what happened to him, he kept going, kept working, kept moving forward. He was very poor, got heartbroken several times, got betrayed by friends, had a complicated relationship with his family, was continually misunderstood and seemed to be all alone in the world. Yet for some reason he kept going. Kept working.

His hardships seemed to fuel his particular view of the world. He embraced sorrow and pain as much as he embraced joy and beauty. Meeting everything that came his way with all heart.

In his paintings his deep desire was to depict a sincere human feeling; Love, sorrow, admiration, curiosity. These feelings are still tangible today when one looks closely at one of his paintings.

I remember last year in a museum standing before ‘La Berceuce’ feeling so much love for this woman he painted, it brought tears to my eyes. As if for one moment I could see through his eyes and feel what he’d felt. As if time didn’t exist and his feeling of love and admiration was never-ending, present in everyone who looked at this painting.

“la tristesse durera toujours” (the sadness will last forever) were Vincent’s last words. Yet Vincent’s life proofs that sorrow seems to be connected to beauty.

He said: “It’s my belief that it is actually one’s duty these days to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love. The more ugly, old, mean, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing brilliant, well arranged, colors.“

Vincent’s life’s work shows that it is possible to take sadness and sorrow and turn them into something amazing, something full of life and color.

Source & inspiration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Life in Letters‘