VanGogh 1

What did he feel while he painted? He wrote that "in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting." We have his rolling clouds, winding cypresses and sunflowers; his visions of used shoes.  Painting is a dirty and difficult occupation, he said.

A Pair of Shoes

Those shoes seem to have tramped hard
Through muddied trails and graveled paths.
The untied leather laces wind
Like used wire.
In front on the scuffed toe
Lines calculate the miles traveled.
The tongue leans over the side,
Stiff but bending in an obstinate crease.
Beside, its partner flops heel up
Hobnails white against the sole
Worn to an oddly-shaped display:
An engraving of intimate obscurity that
Keeps the secrets of the trudged paths.
The rootless traveler, weary,
Drops these companions of his wanderings
On a blue rough surface.
He does what has become natural:
Brushes oil on canvas.
Old worn shoes--the model of his life.
But what did he feel while he painted?
He claimed that we wanted to convey
"Les petites miseres de la vie humanie."
A compassionate painting?
A compassionate man?
Shoes seen without illusion,
A still life of fanatic fidelity
To human pain.

http://www.artquotes.net/masters/vangogh/vangogh_shoes1887.jpg