梵高 Part 05

The Potato Eaters is his first knockout masterpiece.

It's a resume of everything he's felt and thought up to now.

Everything that would make him a revolutionary artist is already here.

The dark, thick colour was chosen not just for pictorial effect, but you might say, philosophically, to say something.

And that something isn't meant to be charmingly rustic.

I mean, how brown can you get?

This is manure brown, the grey brown, as he explained, of dusty spuds before they've been rinsed.

Lost in total identification, van Gogh paints like a clod.

The heavy, loaded brush doing its own manual labour.

The picture seems trowelled and dug, rather than painted.