> But now tell me what Van Gogh has to do with any of that. What on earth does, for example, his famous starry sky painting, arguably his most recognizable work, have to do with a snapshot of reality? That painting has nothing to do with reality. There's no slice of life thing going on there. It's not even CLOSE to what a camera would pick up, even if you account for a smudgy painting style. He's got humongous swirls of light that just don't exist in reality.
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> The paintings of his that involve interior scenes tend to have garish, outright ugly colors and bad perspective lines, both of which would be excusable if they were part of a greater purpose, but what "impression" is being conveyed in these paintings? I don't get the sense of a place or a time or a slice of life; I get the impression of someone who has absolutely no sense of aesthetics.
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> I figure I'm probably either missing something about Van Gogh's work, or simply not one that personally appreciates it. It'd be nice to know which, so if you can explain why you like him, that might be helpful. Better still, though, would be an explanation of why he's considered an impressionist at all, because THAT confuses me even more.
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> Gauguin and Matisse I'm not so open minded about. They just suck.


Isn't it strange how peoples' eyes can see the same thing so differently? When I see a van Gogh, I see the heat of the day, the dryness of the hay, the dullness of the autumnal light; I practically hear the silence in the fields and the occasional calls of the few birds in flight. Van Gogh's work never fails to move me.

As for impressionism, I ain't had much book l'arnin', much less art history classes, but I thought the impressionist style was simply the fact that they didn't paint images, they painted strokes that, when viewed from a distance, gave the impression of an image, much like dot matrix printing. Monet didn't paint a whole buncha pretty waterlilies, he painted blobs that, when viewed from a small distance, give the very distinct impression of waterlillies. I'd call van Gogh a master of that technique. His paintings are almost exclusively similar individual dots or lines that come together to form an image. The forest, not the trees, if you will. It works on the principle that if you give the eye part of an image, the mind will fill in the rest -- a cool concept in itself. Anyway. Just sayin'.

Moudaloudiousie