The link below provides a beautiful insight into the troubled life of Vincent van Gogh. Many are unaware of his journey of faith – his reaching for God with every stroke of the brush.
There are personal things I share (in my own small way) with this wonderful artist: I too aspire to be a painter (but even after 50+ years I, of course, am not even in the same artistic universe as he) – and I too (as was Vincent) am a son of a minister, and we both suffered (and grew) at the hands of the modern Pharisees amongst the Reformed Calvinists.
Here is a passage from Les Miserables which inspired Van Gogh’s Starry Night:
“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume, he lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, and something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the universe.”
In a Letter to Emil Bernard on June 26,1988 van Gogh wrote,
“Christ lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made…living men, immortals.”
https://www.reliefjournal.com/blogposting/2014/06/03/van-gogh-victor-hugo-meet-center-starry-night
A few of my available paintings:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/AfterMonet
Sovereign Love 