The Poet of Sorrow (PIMT)

Your sense of beauty

Faced with a melody that tightens the chest, or the texture of thick paint swirling, your soul answers before your thoughts do. What you believe in is not a polished surface prettiness but work into which human sorrow and pain have been poured without falsehood. The sure vessel of the traditional symphony and of classical composition is inherited, and yet a passion great enough to make that frame creak comes flooding out. Meeting a weighty resonance or a forceful drawn line, you feel the anguish and the urgent feeling inside you being affirmed. You know that even a deep wound of the heart can turn into a noble beauty.

What moves you

When the surging sound of a great orchestra wraps the hall and moves toward a grief-stricken climax. Or the instant you look into the whirl of a night sky painted in dense pigment and feel yourself drawn in.

The beauty you tend to overlook

Let your eye rest sometimes on a quiet order without emotional swell, or on plain expression arranged without emphasis. Rest your fierce passion for a moment and place yourself in a calm empty space, and you will feel a tired heart quietly healed.

The composer in tune with you: Pyotr Tchaikovsky

After the emotional crisis of 1877, he composed his Violin Concerto in 1878. Keeping to the orchestra's traditional sonata form, he lets a weighty surge and a grief-stricken melody explode within it. Massive sound into which he poured his own urgent feeling, held in the vessel of tradition, resonates deeply with a sense of beauty that stays close to the pain of living.

The painter who resonates with you: Vincent van Gogh

He entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889 and completed many works under harsh conditions. In surfaces such as The Starry Night, a night sky is drawn on the canvas in thick paint and surging brushwork. A picture that inherits traditional composition while hurling overflowing feeling at the canvas resonates with your appetite for a deep expression of the soul.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: inheriting traditional forms of expression, and pouring into them, to the very limit, their own difficulty in living and their piercing passion.

Three paintings for you

The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh

Café Terrace at Night

Vincent van Gogh