Theo,
Today I have done a study of the cradle, with a few streaks of color in it. I am also doing a repeat of those meadows, which I sent to you last time.
My hands have become rather too white to my liking, but what can I do about it?
I will also work out of doors again, I am less concerned that I may regret it than about staying off work any longer. Art is jealous, she does not accept that an indisposition should be counted more important than her. So I let her have her way. You should therefore, I hope, soon have a few reasonable drawings sent to you.
People like me should not really be allowed to get ill.
You really have to understand how I consider art. To reach the essence of it, you have to work long and hard. What I want and what I am aiming for is infernally difficult, and yet I believe I am not aiming too high.
I want to make drawings that will touch people. Either in a figure, or in landscape, I would like to express, not something sentimentally melancholy, but sincere sorrow.
In short, I want to get to a stage where it is said of my work: this man feels deeply, and this man is sensitive. Despite my so-called roughness, you understand, or perhaps just because of it.
It seems rather pretentious to talk like this, but that is the reason why I want to devote all my efforts to it.
What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an eccentric, or a disagreeable fellow - someone who has no position in society or will ever have one, in short, the lowest of the low.
Well, assuming that everything were exactly so, then I would like to show through my work what is in the heart of such an eccentric, such a nonentity.
That is my ambition, which in spite of everything is based less on anger than on love, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Although I am often in trouble, there is inside me a serene, pure harmony and music. In the poorest hovel, in the grubbiest corner, I can see paintings or drawings. And as if compelled by an irresistible urge, my soul goes out in that direction.
More and more, other things are pushed out aside, and the more this happens, the sooner my eye can discern the picturesque. Art demands a tenacious effort, an effort in spite of everything, and continuous observation. By tenacious effort I mean in the first place constant labor, but also not abandoning your views at someone else's say-so.
Because I now have such a broad, such a liberal feeling for art and life itself, of which art is also the essence, it seems to me so glaring and false when there are people who only want to rush me. Personally I feel that many modern paintings have a peculiar charm that the old ones don't have.
I hope that apart from the one I did today, I will draw the cradle a hundred times more, with tenacity.
Vincent
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