Vincent Van Gogh Identity Essay

“Identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experiences” was said by James Baldwin. This quote helps convey the idea of identity in art. When someone creates a piece that holds or portrays an aspect of identity, the artwork may symbolically represent many experiences that occurred to the artist, whether that may be positive or negative. The work may also visually depict personal problems, for example the Post-Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh when he painted his tumult life. Van Gogh used not only his personal experiences of failing at so many careers and unfortunate events in his life, but also his use of alcohol, tobacco and his depression and his possible acute intermittent porphyria to create his swirling, colourful pieces.

Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert on the 30th of March, 1853. Sadly, for Van Gogh’s parents, they had a stillborn exactly a year to the date before. This may have gone unnoticed to Van Gogh himself, if his parents didn’t tomb the child in the graveyard with

During his time in Paris, Van Gogh started to reconsider, deconstruct and reform his artistic vision and aesthetic to the artistic approach and style Van Gogh is appreciated today. He had completed 200 paintings while in Paris, showing the necessary progression towards his new form as an artist. Whatever the reason was that he suddenly converted to such a radical avant-garde style, whether it be the Impressionist styles that started to fall in the time of Van Gogh’s move, or the Parisian art circles that Van Gogh surrounded himself with, it started to form more and more as he worked on self-portraits, of which he completed 29 of his most famous 35. He started to implement Impressionist broken or feathering techniques to some of these self-portraits, most notably Self-Portrait with Grey Felt