He did not sell but one painting in his lifetime, was a failed art dealer, and was not too preoccupied with how his paintings were received. But he also developed a highly original style, was one of the pioneers of Modern Art, and created artworks that are now considered sublime and invaluable. Vincent Van Gogh continues to fascinate, appearing strangely contemporary with his singularity, vulnerability, emotional intensity, and passion for creation.

Analyzing Volatility in Writing and Painting

Advanced computational methods of analysis are making it possible to obtain new insights into the creative process of famous artists, such as Van Gogh, including how they conceived ideas and implemented them on the canvas. We applied these methods to digitized versions of his letters and paintings, analyzing them as networks of connected words or colors (Sgourev, Cutoro, Formilan, 2026). We examined patterns of the co-appearance of words in the letters and colors in the paintings during his decade of artistic activity (1881-1890).

Our study demonstrates that volatility was a key source of his creativity. We find consistent evidence in the letters that Van Gogh increasingly oscillated between opposite emotional states, such as joy and sadness or between aspirations for belonging and for isolation, and increasingly integrated dissimilar concepts from diverse fields of knowledge. Similarly, the paintings reveal increasing use of combinations of opposite (“complementary”) colors, such as blue and orange, or red and green. We confirm the popular perception that Van Gogh’s life was becoming more volatile, but highlight his ability to put this volatility to creative use by applying bold combinations of colors on the canvas, pursuing balance between antagonistic, interdependent forces.

“Janusian” Creativity: High Complexity

The volatile, contradictory creative process that emerges from our analysis is not the one that currently dominates psychological scholarship on creativity, emphasizing its positive nature, predictability and organization in the form of “stages” of idea advancement. Rather, our findings lend support to the “Janusian” perspective, originating with Arthur Rothenberg , which places at the center of the creative process the ability to imagine two opposite ideas, concepts, or images existing simultaneously. This ability is essential in creation; a form of tension or opposition generally precedes the motivation that propels the creative effort.

Van Gogh’s creative process accurately illustrates Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s insistence that what sets apart highly creative individuals from others is complexity. Creative individuals show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." Like no one before (or arguably, after) him, Van Gogh embodied contradiction, combining blue and yellow, red and green, suffering and joy, an attitude of brooding and self-doubt, on the one hand, and high motivation and goal-orientation, on the other.

Volatility: A Possible Symptom of Bipolarity

These contradictions have long been viewed as symptoms of possible mental disorders. There is no scholarly consensus on a subject that has generated a variety of accounts and diagnoses. The results of our analysis, attesting to increasing emotional, cognitive and behavioral volatility, are broadly consistent with the conclusions of a diagnostic study, proposing that Van Gogh “likely developed a (probably bipolar) mood disorder in combination with (traits of) a borderline personality disorder” (Nolen, van Meekeren, Voskuil, van Tilburg, 2020). The authors are careful to specify that “no single disorder can explain all his mental problems,” and that he “most likely suffered from several comorbid disorders”. Furthermore, they suggest that “the worsening of his alcohol use since 1886” could be a major contributing factor to his instability. In agreement, our results demonstrate a sudden increase in emotional and behavioral instability around 1886, and a steady upward trend thereafter.

Volatile, but Methodical

As another manifestation of duality, instability co-existed with order. The extent to which Van Gogh’s creative process was methodical in nature is still not well recognized. New pursuits emerged from iterative experimentation, from embracing unexpected flows of personal experience in relating to other artists, friends and family members. Creativity is the result of a process: of learning a knowledge base, struggling with contradictions, addressing problem spaces, filling gaps in information, and recombining symbols or elements in the form of a new configuration.

The organized nature of his creative process comes through clearly in our analysis. We find a high degree of correspondence between letters and paintings; the oscillation between positive and negative emotions in the letters corresponds to the use of opposite colors in the paintings. The letters and the paintings emerged together; the paintings were visual representations of experiences recounted in the letters, but the experiences inspired the pursuit of new means of representation. The creative process unfolded in a back-and-forth movement between writing and painting. Through this interplay, Van Gogh developed expert knowledge of materials: he learned how to use them to express emotions that were at the same time deeply personal and universal.

The Virtues of Ambivalence

Van Gogh’s combination of opposites, of volatility and method, is highly relevant in an increasingly unstable world, marked by dramatic political shifts, economic shocks and contradictory pressures, such as for short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. It is imperative for both companies and individuals to develop the capacity to harness contradictions. An organizational culture that actively embraces opposition, rather than striving to resolve it, can facilitate creativity. One of the likely keywords of the future is “ambivalence”: the ability to balance between contradictory forces in personal life or business. This balance finds one of its earliest and most memorable representations in the paintings of Van Gogh, pioneering a style that aestheticized the contrast between opposite forces.

Sgourev, S.V, Cutolo, D, & Formilan, G., (2026). A Quantitative Approach to Multimodality: An Application to the Creative Process of Van Gogh. Organization Studies (forthcoming). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01708406251381005

Rothenberg, A. (1971). The Process of Janusian Thinking in Creativity. Archives of General Psychiatry, 24(3), 195–205.

Csikszentmihaly, M. (1996) “The Creative Personality”, Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199607/the-creative-personality

Nolen, W.A., van Meekeren, E., Voskuil, P., & van Tilburg,. (2020) New Vision on the Mental Problems of Vincent van Gogh; Results From a Bottom‑up Approach Using (Semi‑)structured Diagnostic Interviews. International Journal of Bipolar Disorders 8:30.

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