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,........

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