Vincent Van Gogh - Influence of American oil painter Jeff Starr. Not only is Van Gogh my favorite painter, I would have to say that his style is the one that seems most natural to my own artistic sensibilities. My favorite paintings are those that evoke a feeling, and something about Van Gogh's work moves me more than any other. Which is funny, because it might just be an image of a field of flowers and trees, but somehow it has great energy and power to it. It reminds me of my favorite line from Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, in the song "Shot In The Arm": 'Something in my veins/Bloodier than blood'. That 'bloodier than blood' part kind of sums it up: Vincent's landscapes are Realer Than Real. Bad grammar, I know, but ee cummings would understand.

Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.

In 1880, Vincent followed the suggestion of his brother Theo and took up art in earnest. In autumn 1880, he went to Brussels, intending to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded Van Gogh (despite his aversion to formal schools of art) to attend the Royal Academy of Art. There he not only studied anatomy, but the standard rules of modelling and perspective, all of which, he said, "you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing." Vincent wished to become an artist while in God's service as he stated, "to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture."

More or less acquainted with impressionist and neo-impressionist techniques and theories, Van Gogh went to Arles to develop these new possibilities. But within a short time, older ideas on art and work reappeared: ideas like doing series on related or contrasting subject matter, which would reflect the purpose of art. Already in 1884 in Nuenen he had worked on a series that was to decorate the dining room of a friend in Eindhoven. Similarly in Arles, in spring 1888 he arranged his Flowering Orchards into triptychs, began a series of figures which found its end in The Roulin Family, and finally, when Gauguin had consented to work and live in Arles side by side with Vincent, he started to work on the The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Most of his later work is elaborating or revising its fundamental settings.