Van Quotes - page 8
![This place [Breitner's new residential location at the Jacob van Campen-straat (De Pijp district), Amsterdam - a newly built street with construction activities all around], is just about the same as the Hobbema-straat, and that is precisely not the character of Amsterdam.. (George Hendrik Breitner)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/87/george-hendrik-breitner-built-849387.webp)
In the spring of 1845, William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, began observing with his great six-foot telescope... The Earl was excited by what he was the first human to see: spiral patterns of stars, seemingly swirling in great 'spiral convolutions' about the centre of the galaxy. ...No one could ever have seen the spiral pattern of stars in a galaxy unless they had looked through Rosse's telescope or seen his drawings. ...I believe that Van Gogh would have seen those drawings in the press following the publicity attracted by them, or in Flammarion's book... and gained his astronomical inspiration from them.
John D. Barrow
Recently I dreamed of you [of the artist Herman van der Weele and his wife] and that you two were very rich and lived in a beautiful place and that I sat in your room with you and Herman, with beautiful fabrics and wallpapers that I couldn't stop looking to them and you wore black glasses, just like me now [to protect his eyes], but they [black glasses] were so amazingly beautiful and they suited you so well, as is only possible in a dream, and your dress was beautifully deep red blue black with exotic figures woven into it and the walls were yellow and pink. Anyway it was all a miracle of beauty and I wished that.... my eyes were healthy again and that we each could spent hundred thousand guilders a week, then we had built a beautiful yacht and we all sailed to the country of the Mikado [Japan], to have a look there.
George Hendrik Breitner
.. isn't it stupid that what you were writing in your article is still understood by so few people. Among others there was somebody - I believe in the [magazine] 'Nieuws van de Dag' -, who thought the 'Old woman in front of the hearth' [painting of Israels]....- how beautifully painted - was as sickening subject. - Furthermore, Alberd. Thijm [Dutch art-critic and very critical of Israel's' often applied 'dejection'] was also raving strongly about my pulling down of the togs of the poor people. Well-roared, lion, I thought - well understood [ironic! ] for what reason I painted it.. (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)
Jozef Israëls
.. Besides of all things I hated and detested was painting. They told me I had a talent for it, and was a clever chap and could make as much money as I liked. Money always the principal thing and so it happens that I got forced into it. Being considered a very clever talented chap, after the war or siege of Paris [1870-71], a young fellow of the name of Vincent van Gogh [not painting yet, but still art-seller at Goupil in Paris] came around asking me for advice... The law of the pocket: 'full' signifies 'rich'; empty 'poor', all the world over the same; black, brown, yellow or white skinned. Heathen, barbarians, Mahommetans; pocket full, 'power.
Matthijs Maris
This exchange – mainly in the form of letters [between the brothers van Gogh] – was not only about painting and art, but covered everything to do with one's existence and the philosophical or religious colouring, in a word: for the reader of the letters written by Vincent to his brother a total of human behaviour is revealed that of the dual being of van Gogh. This is how my first wish and then obsession was started, to build a monument for the two van Gogh brothers.
Ossip Zadkine
Arms, hands [of the two van Gogh brothers, Vincent and Theo], like rifles, thrust out like non-stop ideas thoughts. Enormous thick veins like the ropes of a ship through which flow thoughts and inspirational excitement. They join the two brothers like nerve connections that pass from one body to the other, channeling the waves and opening up both in a magnetic ring of work and passion.
Ossip Zadkine
How should one approach the person of van Gogh in order to be able to build a statue of him? How can one place him outside of himself, separate him from the tragic character of his life? How can one build a statue in the open air which simultaneously evokes the rare and the new person who was van Gogh, as also the enormity of the new aspect of the current and future art of painting?
Ossip Zadkine
Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man!
Nate Ruess
Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green?
Fredric Jameson
I really was keen on not doing his as a heinous arch-villain. But as person who was, at some state, a complex psychological being and a warrior on par with Van Helsing, and in fact a sort of brother in arms to Van Helsing. So one thing I attached myself to quite early was a kind of... because they come from the foothills of the Carpathians and nobody knows what the hell people looked like or spoke like back then, you know, 500 years ago. One thing that I kind of attached myself to was a sort of gypsy look. There's always been Romany going through that area. There's a look that's drawn from that history and apart from that, there are sound psychological reasons for why Dracula does the things that he does in this story, and I like that.
Richard Roxburgh
There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They'll say, 'We love music! It's all about the music!' - but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.
Derek Sivers
