“Storms can be seen and drawn in two ways: firstly as a subject and secondly as a gestural storm on the paper. The very nature of both is turmoil and an interweaving of elements, inks, makes, water, and tossed objects.”
Sarah Simblet, The Drawing Book, page 200
Vincent van Gogh might be said to symbolize a third storm, that of the artist’s temperament, our emotional weather.
In 1890 he wrote to his mother about a painting with a stormy sky he’d done: “And while my illness was at its worst, I still painted, among other things a reminiscence of Brabant, cottages with mossy roofs and beech hedges on an autumn evening with a stormy sky, the sun setting red in reddish clouds.“
