+
,,

What a long Calvary an artist’s life is! And that’s perhaps what makes us go on living. Passion gives life, and we die when it’s no longer nourishing. Let’s abandon these paths lined with thorny bushes, although they have their savage poetry…
Letter from Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh (Brittany, 7 - 9 September 1888)
,,

I don’t know any poetic ideas; it’s probably a sense I’m lacking. I find everything poetic, and it’s in the corners of my heart, which are sometimes mysterious, that I perceive poetry. Led harmoniously, forms and colours in themselves produce poetry. Without letting myself be surprised by the motif, I feel a sensation in front of someone else’s painting that brings me to a poetic state, depending on the painter’s intellectual forces, which emanate from it.
Paul Gauguin
Letter to Vincent van Gogh
Brittany, 7 - 9 September 1888

Letter from Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh (Pont-Aven, July 1888)

How little importance exactness is in art.
Art is an abstraction, unfortunately one becomes more and more misunderstood. I would really like that we reach our goal: that is to say my journey to Provence. I always had the fancy to interpret the bullfights in my own way, as I understand them. I am starting to get the freedom of my faculties: my illness had weakened me and in my last studies I think that what I have done up to now is out of date.
Naturally this band of pigs here find me quite mad, and I that rather pleases me because it proves to me that I am not.
…I don’t know why, but for about ten days I have painted a lot of madness in my head that I intend to execute in the Midi: I believe that is because of my state of health, which is flourishing again. I have a need of struggle; to carve with a club. After all the research that I have just done here I believe it will help me to go better than before.

Until we are together, an affectionate handshake,
Paul Gauguin.