VAN GOGH MUSEUM ( by Tatamo Guxens )

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born 30 March 1853 and he dies 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered fromanxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life and died, largely unknown, at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers and traveled between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught in England. An early vocational aspiration was to become a pastor and preach the gospel, and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium. During this time he began to sketch people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. Today many of his pieces (including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers) are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art. My favourite painting is Undergrowth 1889, because When a patient at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh made many paintings of the shady, overgrown hospital garden. To Theo, he wrote this on his life in the hospital: ‘seeing as life takes place mainly in the garden, it is not so very sad.’ With short brushstrokes that create a blurred effect, he painted the undergrowth that grew beneath the twisted tree trunks there.

Broken by the dapples of light, woodland shade was a theme that had often occupied Van Gogh. When he had worked in the Parisian region two years earlier he had also painted a series of such scenes.

Undergrowth 1889 (Van Gogh Museum)

Van Gog