Introduction

Art provides the person or people who produce it and the community that observes it with an experience that might be aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, or a combination of these qualities. When looking into paintings, we can see the emotions of the painter. In Van Gogh's paintings, we can easily understand his emotions when he was painting the picture. Paintings can also be the reflection of living styles like in the pictures of Toulouse-Lautrec. Some kinds of art can also reflect both living styles and emotions. For example in Gauguin's paintings we understand the way he lived and also his emotions when he painted his pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh is a famous impressionist, born on March 30, 1858 at Groot-Zundert, a village in Dutch Brabant. Exactly one year before, his mother gave birth to a stillborn child, who would also have been named Vincent. Writers of psychoanalytic studies attribute many of Vincent's difficulties as a child and his later preoccupation with sickness and death to the fact that he was a so-called 'replacement child'. Another explanation might be that his parents had buried the first born Vincent next to their house: daily, the small Vincent might have seen a gravestone inscribed with his own name and birthday.

His sister Elisabeth wrote about Vincent: "Vincent's brothers and sisters felt instinctively, with the delicate sensitiveness of children, that their brother preferred to be alone. If he had a vacation from boarding-school, he sought not their companionship, but, rather solitude." She said that Vincent loved to walk and read, as long as he could be left alone.

His father wanted Van Gogh to be an art dealer so he sent Van Gogh to a gallery to be taught about art. Unfortunately he was never an ordinary person so he stopped going to the art gallery. Then he started to attend Cormon's course that Toulouse-Lautrec was taking lessons from. By the time he was having his second unhappy love affair.

After the death of his father, Van Gogh needed money and he gave himself to work more than before. He had arguments with Toulouse-Lautrec and Bernard and he met Gauguin. Van Gogh and Gauguin became good friends and shared projects together. Unfortunately they had many arguments. Vincent was becoming a mad man and he was attacking to Gauguin in the arguments. In one of their arguments Van Gogh cut his ear in order to give himself a punishment for treating badly to his friend. After this argument friendship broke up.

Theo: "Vincent and I can absolutely not live together without turmoil, because of our incompatible characters, and both he and I need quietness for our work." And Vincent wrote: "All and all I think Gauguin will either definitely leave or definitely stay."

Van Gogh shot himself in a madness attack. The bullet had entered his side instead of his heart, and he had been able to walk home. Vincent asked for Dr. Gachet, who was sent for. The local physician had already been called. The two doctors concluded that it was impossible to remove the bullet. The next morning Theo arrived from Paris and remained at Vincent's bedside, while Vincent lay there quietly smoking his pipe. When Theo tried to persuade him that he would be healed, Vincent answered: "La tristesse durera toujours." (Sadness shall last forever) Vincent died the next night, July 29, at half past one.

Emotions

In France, he was immediately impressed by the hot reds and the yellows of the Mediterranean, which he symbolically used to represent his own mood. When he became a voluntary patient at the St. Remy asylum, he was admired of some other painters. He changed his palette into pinks, but his brushwork was increasingly agitated. The dashes changed into swirlings, twisted shapes, which were often seen as symbolic as his mental state.

After the fit of madness, his life became very unhappy and his work suffered correspondingly. When he was in asylum, the 150 pictures he painted there show us how desperate he was to live. We can see how lonely he was from his paintings.

"His brush strokes twisted and turned with his fluctuating emotions, for him nature came to represent the inescapable disasters which overwhelm man kind"

In one of his pictures he painted the night very dark and also very shiny which was explaining death. In the month he painted that picture he shot himself and he died in such a night. When he was painting that picture, most probably he was in a depressive mood.

Paul Gauguin

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary;
and it is they alone who are masters."
"Where do we come from ?
What are we ?
Where are we going ?"
Paul Gauguin 1898

Paul Gauguin is also a famous impressionist, born in 1848 in Atuana. He is also a French painter like Toulouse-Lautrec. His father was a journalist and his family moved to Lima after Napoleon the IIIrd's attack. After 4 years Paul returned to Orleans with his mother. When he was 17, he saw the entire world when working in a ship. He married Mette Sophie Gad.

After his teenage life, he met Camille Pisarro and started to work him. In his first paintings he was generally using dark colors. He was making money only by selling his paintings so he was always painting. After sometime he started to hate Europe and civilization.

He met Vincent Van Gogh and worked with him for sometime. The friendship ended with the loose of Vincent's ear. He also met George Seurat and Paul Signac who admired him much.

He moved to Tahiti and lived there until he died. In Tahiti, his colors changed into bright colors, he wasn't such hateful as before. He left impressionism there and started to paint in a new way. He inspired even Matisse and Picasso.

Emotions

In his entire life, Gauguin's main aim was to express ideas, thoughts, and emotions directly. He wanted everybody to look at his paintings and understand what he tried to express. When we look into his paintings, we can understand his emotions by the colors he used. Also the places he painted show us where he lived so we can understand his living style by looking at the details.

Gauguin inspired many painters; he started new genres of art, Fauvism and expressionism. He was a postimpressionist who expressed his ideas, beliefs by his paintings. He showed his happiness by bright colors and sadness by dark colors. He hated civilization; he painted Tahiti where he moved.

Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec

The living style of Toulouse-Lautrec was different than an ordinary person's life. Toulouse-Lautrec was born in an aristocratic family, in France in 1864. Toulouse-Lautrec's father was a count. Count was also known as notorious, eccentric for all kinds of unpredictable behaviors. He was not acting like an aristocrat in some ways, even his living style was different then a normal aristocrat. The different personality of Count Alphonse could have pass to little Henri and may be Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec carries some of the characteristics of his father.
Toulouse-Lautrec had a genetic problem in his 12th age and he broke his legs and he didn't grow up after the incident. Toulouse-Lautrec was so short to follow his dad when riding horse. Because he couldn't ride horse or do things like his father, he started to deal with painting and sketching.

He was a teenager who was honored to be a student of artist Fernard Cormon. His studio was located in Montmartre. After his graduation from Cormon's school of arts, he started to have a bohemian life. He was always drinking so he made pictures of cabarets, racetracks and brothels. Love and alcohol were his mistresses. He started going to the "Moulin Rouge" and he also made the pictures of Moulin Girls. Moulin Rouge (Red Mill) was a symbol of Paris at that time.

Today we know Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as the archetypical bohemian artist of that beautiful era in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec captured the spirit and the emotion of the era in his portraits and posters. Although his handicap and alcohol abuse kept him from enjoying some of life's pleasures, Toulouse-Lautrec clearly shared in the "Joie de Vivre" (Joy of life) of the time. Today we can share it in his art works.

Conclusion

Paintings reflect the emotions and living styles of the painters. Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin are some examples of reflection of emotions and living styles into art. When looking into a painting, seeing the living style of the painter makes us understand the conditions he lived in, the problems he faced. The emotions we see can be strokes or colors. A tear can turn into a deep color or a smile can turn into a smooth color. Stars can be hopes, night can be hopelessness.
"Art is freedom" says Leonardo da Vinci. Freedom is using colors, making strokes. When we dive into freedom of painters, we can see the reflection of their pain, their happiness, their sadness or their fear. We can feel a lot of different thinks when are looking at a picture. The things we see are living style and emotions of the painter.
"Art is a way to escape". Art is a way to escape from all pains. We can live in paintings; we can see parts of us in paintings. We can share the thoughts of painters; we can be the one of a person in the paintings. The most important thing is that we can go to the other parts of the world. We can go to Tahiti where Gauguin lived; we can go to the Moulin Rouge. Or we can see the father of Toulouse-Lautrec, we can go to the clinic and we can share their pain. We can find the reflections of living styles and emotions in art.

Bibliography

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