“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have to let yourself go and paint. In your early life you learned the discipline of form, most necessary. The knowledge of form is one that many never assimilate. You were giving yourself a thorough foundation. The framework, learning the form first, was adopted for several reasons, having to do with other existences, to some extent given.

You wanted to express ideas in paintings that do not come in youth, and to merge a particular kind of understanding with a particular kind of form. You had an existence in which your art matured early, as Josef in Ruburt’s Seven. You dealt with emotion unrestrained by discipline, and with the feelings of a young man. Josef was not able to paint anything worthwhile past the age of 40, and he turned to a land-owner’s province.

Van Gogh, for your information, was (underlined) obsessed personally with ideas of self-mutilation, and underwent great inner torture. He chose those feelings however so that he could view the world and reality in a certain light. That light enabled him to do what he wanted to but could not fake: paint the world through that particular unique vision.

Wheat fields for example, filled not only with the vitality of sun and growth but bristling with creativity that (in quotes) “destroyed” each part of itself in death, that was transformed instantaneously into a new spectacular form in which the creativity and destruction were always apparent, and yet one in which violence was necessarily turned into life.

Your own great problem, the inhibition of emotion, fits in with your own designs as well as his did. He was not ever satisfied with his work and had far less satisfaction in general from his fellow beings than you have.

His “success” (in quotes) was no success to him. The illumination that makes great paintings, again, has nothing to do with time. A man may work for nearly a century and not attain it, or it may come tomorrow afternoon.

Van Gogh was true to his vision, which means he was true to the self he created for himself in that time, and so must you be. But you must also have faith in what you have done, for it was all done in faithful rendering of your view of reality (in quotes) “at any given time.” And therefore the fact for example that you withheld certain kinds of emotion from it is not a failure.

The repression however was to remind you of freer patterns that would and could flow. A landscape is not lacking because it is not a portrait. They are two different kinds of things, but you would sense the different kind of thing. Now. The repressed emotion itself is apparent in your past paintings. It is something that you cannot try to put into them. You cannot fake it, and so you did not fake it.