Discover the art and life of Vincent van Gogh: a journey of passion, self-expression, and resilience in the face of obstacles.
Vincent Van Gogh had to overcome obstacles to success just like you and I—arguably more so. His lifelong passion for art, nature, living away from the noise and chaos of large cities, the simplicity and beauty of Japanese paintings, and his long and painful search for true self-expression and loving relationships were driven by his quest to find enduring love.
During his short life, so much of what he sought eluded him. But he kept striving. As a Chinese proverb reminds us, “The Glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time you fall.”
His development as a painter was hampered by too much poverty, his relationships with women were torturous and fleeting, his mental health fragile, his relations with family and friends turbulent, and his final descent into mental illness horribly tragic, happening just when he had, at last, found his own unique style and was poised for success. I feel for Vincent, I truly do.
“I have such joy in the house and in my work that I dare even to think that the joy will not always be solitary but that you will have a share in it and the zest of it, too.”
And yet, as he wrote in one of his letters to his beloved brother Theo, he persevered anyway. “I have such joy in the house and in my work, that I dare even to think that the joy will not always be solitary but that you will have a share in it and the zest of it too.”
His brother, Theo, an art dealer, supported Vincent financially, In return, at Vincent’s insistence, for he did not want to be a burden, Vincent set Theo paintings for him to sell. During his lifetime, Theo only sold one painting. And then not even enough to recoup costs. Vincent despaired that his paintings didn’t sell, but he kept following his joy-filled passion anyway.
This is inspiring and encouraging. I only wish that his mental anguish could have been, as he once lamented, treated earlier, including his abuse of alcohol.
Vincent found comfort and companionship in his art. Perhaps he never would have poured so much beauty, hope and healing into his paintings had his life been easier. I can identify with this. Like me, Vincent painted himself happy. Even when, against his will, his liberty was stolen and he was imprisoned in an asylum. Eventually, life, the taunts and unkindness of others, and loneliness broke him.
Success in art sales came only after Vincent’s tragic death. Some reports suggest Vincent took his own life by suicide. Other point to an accidental shooting by young boys. Whatever the cause, tragically he died in his brother’s arms on 29 July 1890. He was only thirty-seven years old. But what a life. What a legacy. What an inspiration for us all.
“Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak,” Vincent wrote to his brother. He is still speaking to us, centuries later. Of hope, of beauty, of love—and sadness, despair and loneliness too. But above all, the power of art to inspire, console and heal.
In my thirties, I was very lucky to have been able to stay in New York and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was even luckier because while I was there I saw Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece, Roses, and unexpectedly rediscovered a passion I had forgotten. I share the following excerpt from my Passion Journal at that time (which, incidentally, was bright red!) in the hope that it illustrates some of the strategies I encourage clients who I mentor to try.
And so it was that my ‘body barometer’ reminded me of the deep joy and love I feel when I paint. But more than this, I felt Vincent’s joy. I felt his spirit. I felt his love. Vincent spoke to me through his art and he inspired me to paint again.
A psychic once told me, “Paintings are how Spirit speak to you.” Vincent believed this. And I do too.
After reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, 20 or more years ago, like Vincent ‘a late bloomer’ in my 30’s, I set myself a challenge to paint and sell my art through galleries. Success did not come straight away. I got knocked back by several dealers. But then came success. I thought it was a great confirmation of the power of passion when an art gallery owner, who exhibited and sold some of my paintings not long after I returned from New York, said to me, ‘You have a rare ability to capture an emotion.’ This was Vincent’s gift, too. He felt deeply and he gave deeply.
I can capture emotion, but I can sense it too. And so could Vincent. He once lamented, “I don’t know if I’m extremely sensitive or life is unbearable.”
I feel many of us can relate to this dilemma. There is no doubt life can be very brutal, but life also holds considerable beauty and opportunity if, like the sunflower, we turn our attention towards the sun. This is why, in the wake of the Covid pandemic, I turned my attention to joy, and inspired by Vincent and other artists like Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe, began my series of flower paintings.
“Rose, peonies and anthuriums,” said a new collector who purchased two of my paintings during my Summer Love exhibition, ‘Who would have guessed I’m a florist.”
As I shared on my blog, flowers are resilient and strong. They can grow through cracks in concrete and flower in some of the most barren and harsh landscapes. And they always bring joy! Flowers are also incredibly fragile wee souls, sensitive to harsh winds, gusting rage, and unsolicited attacks. But they bloom anyway. As must we—often in the face of tremendous adversity.
Aretha Franklin was once told that music would save her. And it did. I wrote in my journal the other day, art has saved me. And it has. But it’s more than art…because, as Joan Mitchell once said, “I don’t make ugly art.”
It’s beauty that has saved me, and it is the gift I share with the world. The other day, for example, I posted an image of She Smiled Softly, which is now hanging in the new beauty spa in Kerikeri. “So beautiful,” someone wrote.
I was reminded of the healing power of beauty by a passage I had read in a wonderful book by Piero Ferrucci, Beauty and The Soul: “We will be saved by beauty”
“Where is my soul?” Asks Piero Ferrucci in his wonderful book. “That is perhaps the only question worth answering. Each of us answers in his or her own way.”
I was once told I had the soul of an artist. But for so many years, actively discouraged by my parents, I shut off my creativity. I turned to banking, and accountancy and later became a recruitment consultant for IT professionals. Gosh, to think I knew nothing about computer programming! Not long after getting that job I grew to hate (a boss who threatened to smash my head in didn’t help), I got shingles and was told I was lucky I didn’t go blind. I share more about how this experience led me to change careers and love life again (and you can too) in Midlife Career Rescue (the Trilogy)
Van Gogh tried a few careers, unsuccessfully, and then announced, “I want to be an artist.” Largely self-taught, he also took a few courses with established artists, which is something I have done too. Including Max Gimblett, who I studied with in Mauri. Hawaii after winning the Supreme Prize of the Wait Art Awards.
You may enjoy my blog post: MAX GIMBLETT, CASSANDRA GAISFORD AND INSPIRATION>>
In April 2023, I’m excited to be sharing my art secrets at my 3-day-in-person Bay of Islands art retreat. Are you coming? 3-day Women’s Art Retret Friday 05 to Sunday 07 April 2024
This 3-day retreat is going to be fun and fabulous – a perfect opportunity to tackle the large canvases you’ve always wanted to paint!
I came across this article recently following the media flurry caused by two women throwing tomato soup at one of Vincent van Gogh’s beautiful sunflower paintings.
“In less than a week Van Gogh painted a series of still-lifes of Sunflowers. Although they failed to sell during his lifetime, they would now be worth an unimaginable sum. Today the Sunflowers are arguably the world’s most instantly recognisable artworks.
It is less well-known that Vincent painted four still-lifes of sunflowers in the Yellow House in Arles in 1888. The first, with three sunflowers, has always been hidden away in private collections. The second, with six flowers, was destroyed in a bombing raid in Japan during the Second World War.”
It’s fun to think that someone writes a weekly blog about van Gogh. I’m going to follow a few more of the author’s posts. in one of Martin Bailey‘s articles he asks:
It got me thinking! Many of my new collectors are being brave and ahead of their time too. Like my new collector who mentioned I had forgotten to sign my painting, Love is a Flower, and could I please add my signature to the front and back: “I’m sure it doesn’t really matter but when you are super famous…” she wrote.
Who knows if I’ll be famous? LOL. It’s not my goal, and I don’t think it was Vincent’s either. Like me, he wanted to paint himself happy and to share beauty with the world.
As the Van Gogh museum shares in this article:
Van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers are among his most famous. He did them in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow ‘and nothing else’. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.
The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh: they communicated ‘gratitude’, he wrote. He hung the first two in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House. Gauguin was impressed by the sunflowers, which he thought were ‘completely Vincent’. Van Gogh had already painted a new version during his friend’s stay and Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, which Vincent was reluctant to give him. He later produced two loose copies, however, one of which is now in the Van Gogh Museum.
What joy! Look what just flew in from New Work! A rare, limited edition of Joan Mitchell’s Sunflowers. I hadn’t realized she and I shared an affinity for Vincent Van Gogh and also rotting flowers… which I find so beautiful in the final throes of their life.🌻 (You may also enjoy my blog post, ODE TO JOAN MITCHELL: PAINTING LIKE A CHILD)
“Consider this: Mitchell’s sunflowers bloom for us, in their glory, singly and in floral banks. They reward us in the fullness of their moment, which is not much longer than the painter takes to reimagine them, but they die dead.
Mitchell insists that they do. They decay into weeds and sticks. They don’t swoon or wilt in elegiac tristesse, like Victorian maidens, or submit themselves willingly to “the great cycle of life.”
They turn ugly and forbidding, rot and burn away. This would be the irony: that the longevity of Joan Mitchell’s paintings might be attributed to the fact that she believed in death – and life, too, perhaps, but nothing else, nothing with a capital letter, not Painting, Art, Genius, Heroism, History, America, Patriotism, True Love, or even doubt, or even nature, as it is romantically conceived.
So, I do not offer the suggestion lightly. After 30 years of looking at Mitchell‘s paintings, the attribute that defines their glory best for me is their uninflected atheism, which is not the atheism of one who has forsaken God but one who never thought to mention that we were anything other than lonely creatures on a big planet .”
Joan Mitchell Sunflowers, Essay by Dave Hickey, New York, 2008
A couple who at the time I began writing this post confirmed two very large commissions are speculating that the value of my paintings will appreciate. Who really knows what way the arrow will fly, the important thing is to remain authentic and the quest to share love, beauty and joy and to share that joy with others, as Vincent sought to do. Here is a fun impromptu video when they saw the painting I had created:
Bailey writes, “It may come as no surprise that the first sale after Van Gogh’s death included Three Sunflowers (August 1888). This was the first of four still lifes of sunflowers that he painted in the Yellow House in Arles. Sold in April 1891, the buyer was the French critic Octave Mirbeau, who had just published a glowing review of Van Gogh’s work.”
A year earlier, In January 1890, six months before Vincent died, an article by Albert Aurier, entitled ‘Les Isolés’, appeared in Mercure de France. In it the author singled out van Gogh from among other contemporary artists as ‘sublime’, a ‘hyperaesthete’ who perceives with ‘abnormal intensity the scarcely visible secret characteristics of lines and forms, and especially the colours, lights, nuances invisible to healthy people’ and the ‘magic iridescences of shadows’.
He will, he said, never be truly understood except by true artists, and ordinary people who have escaped the conventional teachings of the day. Van Gogh is possessed of a ‘terrible and maddened genius’. (Source: Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (p. 452). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.)
Vincent’s sales grew exponentially following his death. Many are now traded in excess of $50 million dollars. Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet still holds the record for the most expensive Van Gogh, although it sold as long ago as 1990. At Christie’s, it fetched $83m, then the highest auction price for a work by any artist. My other muse, Leonardo da Vinci, has since topped that at a whopping $450 million for his portrait of Christ, Saviour of The World. Here’s hoping!
Growing up, I was constantly criticized. I can count the positive feedback on my hand. No doubt, my mother and father were criticised heavily too. Their childhoods were mired by a mix of abuse, neglect, and other issues that made life sometimes unbearable. Of course, there were good times too. Perhaps, just not as many as other families. I have come to understand that, yes, I am sensitive. Not just sensitive, but super sensitive. Which is a great thing for an artist. Without this heightened awareness of colour, mood, emotion, beauty—and brutality, artists’ would be less attuned to create.
To keep my vibrations high, I like to collect and share positivity. This includes keeping and surrounding myself with inspiring and uplifting quotations. Recently, I’ve begun to make a few to go with my paintings and plan to turn these into a book so others can be uplifted too.
Both these smaller works on paper, inspired by Vincent van Gogh, were purchased by a gorgeous lady I first met many moons ago while I ran my image and colour consultancy, The Colour Girl. I love that some fifteen years later, we are still in touch, and when she saw these tiny works of heart she fell in love instantly. There is an immediacy and flow to these works, which poured from my heart onto the paper in a joyful ode to Vincent during one of my painting workshops.
It’s been a real delight to see how many of my tiny paintings, often begun as a play date in the studio, have sparked such joy in peoples’ lives.
I came across this quote from Louise Hay as I was writing this post:
“Every thought you think and every word you speak is an affirmation. All of your self-talk, your internal dialogue, is a stream of affirmations. You’re using affirmations every moment whether you know it or not. You’re affirming and creating your life experiences with every word and thought.”
I was also reminded that words can trigger the stress response in our bodies just as coming face-to-body with a hungry lion. This is why it’s so important to be vigilant with what we, and others, say to us. Using words as wands, not weapons, is why I love to name my paintings with uplifting affirmations.
My paintings are my babies. I like to give my children beautiful names that allow them to flower into their true potential. Sometimes I wonder why my mother named me Cassandra. But then, look into the history of the name, and I found Cassandra was a truth-teller with a huge BS detector (like my muse Eric Clapton).
Sometimes my paintings are named after song lyrics playing in the studio. Love is a Flower and On The Bright Side of the Road, and also my newer works, Let Your Love Rain Down On Me.
Sometimes, a story someone tells me about how they named their child and the meaning behind it, sparks a painting and a title. Like Cordelia and Te Ataroa. Te Ataroa was inspired by and named after a beautiful baby who was only three months old when I saw her while she was with her mum shopping for groceries. The young couple had lost a little girl who, a year earlier, was stillborn. Their new daughter Te Ataroa was a blessing. Translated her name means “the long morning”.
As I painted the artwork I imagined Te Ataroa’s sister shining down from heaven, sending her family endless kisses across the morning sky. The colours were inspired by the pretty little pink, white, and green floral dress Te Ataroa was wearing when I met her. I showed the young couple a photo of the painting and they told me that their mother wept because it touched their hearts. After exhibiting this painting in a group exhibition, The Beauty of Resilience, just as New Zealand emerged from the first Covid lockdown in 2020. After the exhibition, I gifted this painting to the family.
Sometimes, it’s a line of poetry, as I did with When Love First Tasted Your Lips. The name of this painting was inspired by the lines of a poem by Persian Mystic, Rumi, “When love first tasted the lips of a human being it started singing.” The painting was inspired by some flowers I saw growing in my compost bin—beautiful vibrant dahlias. Right now, I’m feeling compelled to create a book, The Artist’s Garden, to share more of the beauty that inspires my work.
Several seasons ago I did create a book, Flower Power that showcases some of my botanical photos and has some of my favourite quotes by the Persian mystic Rumi. You can download it instantly here
https://www.blurb.com/b/8638155-flower-power
Or purchase a gorgeous hardcover version from Amazon here:
I don’t know, as Vincent van Gogh once said, if I’m extremely sensitive or life is unbearable. I think it’s both. I hope, as always, my musing helps you stay sane in an insane world. I know how healing art can be and the value and liberation of turning our minds and hearts toward the sun. And of course, inspiring people are like vitamins for the soul. Which is why I love the call to ‘pierce poise’ articulated so well in the biography of another of my muses, Helen Frankenthaler. I don’t look as fierce as Helen, but my act of rebellion in a world ruled by fear is to show up for joy! What fun!
Learn to paint amazing abstracts with award-winning artist Cassandra Gaisford in her amazing Bay of Islands garden and flower sanctuary.
🐝Be creative
💐Feel inspired by nature
🌼Grow resilience through happy art
🎨Feel energised through colour
👶Connect with your fun-loving inner child
Experience true liberation!
Leave with a painting you never thought you’d create and love!
For more info and to grab your spot>>
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ABOUT CASSANDRA
I am an artist, storyteller, intuitive guide, mentor and Reiki master. All my creations are infused with positive energy , inspiration, and light. I believe in magic and the power of beauty, joy, love, purpose, and creativity to transform your life. My greatest joy is helping your realize your dreams. That makes my soul sing!
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