Take note that Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. He was an artist because he had to be.
There was more than money considerations at play in his world.
The Van Gogh story is, like most, much more complicated, and in its complexity defies easy categorization. It is easy and damaging to simplify it. (The same can be said of his paintings.) The concept of "artist", as we now understand it, did not exist at the time. Van Gogh came from a reasonably well-to-do family. He was trained professionally as an art dealer, and was successful at that as a young man. He came to drawing and painting as an adult, after a protracted religious crisis. He painted because he wanted to. He lived off his brother's generosity, and was bothered by his dependency. As a painter, he was among a group of upstarts working in a new, little known, style. Within that group, he was widely and completely recognized as doing excellent, ground-breaking work. Unfortunately for him then, and for his social legacy, he suffered from mental illness, and died at 37 from an infection caused by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (The
Wikipedia entry on Van Gogh is excellent.)
From his life's story, I want to emphasize two things relevant to this thread:
- He wanted to make paintings. His desire to have materials to work with, and his need for money to pay for them, were driven by the end product, which was paintings.
- Painting is not photography. The slow accretion of thoughful work that goes into a painting (even de Kooning spent hours planning his next "moves") has no real equivalent in photography. And the hunter's joy — "shot", "captured", "Got it!" — that is for many a central part of photography has no equivalent in painting.
I see in the above, facets of an important difference: the over-riding egotism in photography is different from the over-riding egotism of photography. The OP has stated — I can't tell with what degree of seriousness — that his/her photographic egotism is obscene. I concur (but need more information). Our current practice of photography invites a substitution of (the relatively easy) "I bought this" in the place of (the difficult) "I made this". That substitution could not occur in painting.
I think photographers and photography could learn much from painting.
(NB: I am aware that I have run as rough-shod over the OP as I have implied Peter trampled Van Gogh. I welcome corrections, etc.)
