Van Gogh's Influence on My Style: A Shared Language.
- Pascal Lagesse
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
When viewers connect my work to Van Gogh, they are identifying something real, and it is worth examining with some precision rather than treating it as a passing compliment. He is among the painters who shaped my understanding of colour and composition, and the affinities between his approach and my own are specific and traceable. I will try here to write about Van Gogh's influence on my own style and find a shared language.
Expressive colour
The strongest link between us lies in the treatment of colour. Van Gogh worked at the point where Post-Impressionism broke with naturalistic description. He did not record the colour in front of him but heightened and reinvented it to convey emotional and symbolic meaning, and in doing so he prepared the ground for the Fauves who followed. His fields and skies operate at an intensity that has no equivalent in observed nature.
My practice proceeds from the same principle. When I set a green sky above a Mauritian coast, or render an animal in a colour it has never worn in life, I am choosing tone for its expressive charge rather than its accuracy. The central conviction I share with Van Gogh is that colour carries feelings, and that a painting can remain true to an impression while departing from the literal. I work within a lineage he helped establish, and I regard that as a foundation on which I develop my style.
The contour and the debt to Japonisme
There is a formal connection in the drawing itself. My compositions are constructed on a firm dark blue outline, each shape defined and contained before colour is applied. Van Gogh arrived at a comparable device during the period when Japanese woodblock prints reshaped his work. In his cloisonnism-inspired work, he enclosed flat areas of colour within strong dark contours, a strategy learned directly from Japonisme, which also flattened his handling of space and simplified his forms.
We draw on the same source. Those prints taught both of us the value of a decisive edge and a clear, bright shape. The outline in my work performs the function his did: it organises the composition and allows each field of colour to read with full clarity.
A commitment to place
Van Gogh built his mature work around Provence. The cypresses, the wheat, the modest houses and the working people of Arles formed a sustained study of a single locality, approached with the seriousness usually reserved for grander subjects. His method was to look closely at the ordinary world immediately around him.
My subject is Mauritius, examined in the same spirit. The fishermen and their pirogues, the cane cutters below Pieter Both, the old houses that are steadily disappearing, the dodo before humanity that stands in for a lost natural history, these are the materials of the place I know. The parallel is not incidental. We both hold that a painter's own territory, studied with attention, is a sufficient and worthy subject for a life's work.
Painting as a source of light
Van Gogh's work is often read through its difficulty, but a consistent aim runs through it: the pursuit of light and consolation. The sunflowers, the sower moving into a bright field, the recurring image of the sun all point to painting understood as a means of offering something restorative to the viewer.
That intention aligns closely with my own. I work deliberately toward images of warmth and optimism, and I regard the delivery of that light to the viewer as the purpose of the work. Where his radiance emerged from the fields of the Midi, mine is drawn from the palette of a tropical island, but the underlying position is shared.
What I contribute to the shared language
Influence is most productive when it is extended rather than repeated, and this is where my work takes its own direction within the tradition. My surfaces are flat and overpainted, built to support the patterning that defines my style: the fields of circles, dots, triangles and short marks that fill the skies, seas and hillsides of my canvases. That motif structure draws on the Austrian painter Hundertwasser, on naïve and folk traditions, and on my admiration for Aboriginal Australian painting, as much as on any single source. Van Gogh absorbed the Japanese print and made it his own; I absorb his example, among others, and direct it toward a distinctly Mauritian visual language.
Owning one's influences
No style arrives from nowhere. Every painter builds on those who came before, taking in what speaks to them and setting aside what does not, and there is no loss of standing in acknowledging it. This is where an artist's freedom truly lies: in the right to take what earlier work offers and to fashion from it a language of one's own. What matters is the intention behind the borrowing. Copying reproduces, while influence transforms. The task is not to repeat what Van Gogh did but to let what he opened up lead somewhere he never went, and that is what I have tried to do by carrying his example toward the light and the subjects of Mauritius. For that reason I regard him not as a model to imitate but as one of the artists who gave me the means to arrive at a style of my own.
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