The tortured artist stereotype

I hate it, but it has to come from somewhere. Sometimes Van Gogh gets blamed for it and maybe that's not without merit.

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man -somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

This is my ambition, which is, in spite of everything, founded less on anger than on love, more on serenity than on passion.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven toward these things with an irresistible force.

I guess at least he had the opportunity to achieve that calm and harmony, though he was by most accounts not wealthy or even comfortable. Modern life should afford more of this than the early industrial revolution, but we're spending our technological efforts teaching computers to paint the sunflowers instead of ourselves. Yes, I'm still ranting about that, and shit like this is not gonna make me stop anytime soon.

Also: I think the piece about love vs anger is important: it's lost so often because he's still thought of as "disagreeable."