sat dreamily on his bed for entire hours, smoking his pipe to the last dregs while the better part of the night was slowly fading away and giving rise to dawn. All of a sudden he arose and prepared another canvas. The white color of it had never been as inviting as it was now. He painted the peasants just as he had seen them, seating around the table, with the youngest daughter tenderly attending to her father and the two women in the corner dressed in shabby, dark colors that resembled those of a potato. He painted portraits but while following nature, he now bent it to his whims. The whole painting depicted these peasants’ way of life in artistic form. The painting brush fell from his hands as the last stroke was completed. He smiled happily as the last ounce of energy surged within him. He had painted his masterpiece.He left for Paris the day after. Paris had become the center of arts and painting, in particular. A whole new world, bursting with light and new meaning was laying Gjikondi 4underneath the older and darker one, just like a sleeping volcano lays underneath the brown core of the Earth. It was war against the formal, the dark, the conventional. Light was struggling to find a way into the dark paintings of that time and modern, pioneering painters were bravely opposing the critics and the scornful, conventional opinion, oblivious to everything else but the efforts to express themselves in new tones, new colors, and new ideology.Van Gogh was caught in the movement. It arrested his attention and increased his awareness towards his paintings. He constantly compared them with others and found out that while he thought like these painters, he shared with them none of the colors and forms. It was a race to find the sublime under the temporary, the beautiful under the mutilated, the sacred under the immoral, and he decided to borrow from them only the means of conveying his message. His previous works were stud...
