Happy birthday, van Gogh.

van Gogh, Self-portrait with Straw Hat, 1887

Vincent van Gogh was born on this date in 1853.

I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.  In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.  If you work diligently, without saying to yourself beforehand, "I want to make this or that," if you work as though you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupation, you will not always find you do well. But the days you least expect it, you will find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before.  He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and finds life too short to do the whole.  It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.

Vincent van Gogh