When it comes to drawing Van Gogh isn't really "a master". He began painting very late in life, didn't have a long apprenticeship and his career lasted just 10 years. Also, he lived in a cultural context (post-impressionism) that was moving away from classical notions of drawing and composition.
Besides, he wasn't the kind of guy that would spend days or weeks or months in a painting. Most of his paintings were the work of one day or afternoon on the field or beach, he wanted that quick burst of expression. That's why he was so prolific. Think jazz improvisation, not classical music composition.
The greatness of his work comes from the vibrant use of colour and brushwork, not drawing and composition.
I later came to realize that paintings can show things photographs can’t, often much more.
Every time you “say” (express) something you are making choices: emphasizing some things and glossing over others. Something strange happens to you but when you tell me about it you skip the extraneous details and focus on what reinforces your point. Taking a photograph, even if not edited (cropped, lighting changed, etc), and even if spontaneous or lucky, is as much about what is not in the frame as what is. In a good movie, we don’t have to wait while the character goes to the bathroom, or while they drive to the store. We just get the part of the story that matters (this is Chekhov’s gun).
All that is true of a painting, but like a story you can make lots of edits, pulling things literally into the frame that are metasyntactic, that a camera would never see.
In a way the sharp literalism of a photo is much too limiting, as it tunes your visual system to focus on the image itself more than what might be expressed.
It was only a faily small piece but the guy really gobbed so much paint on there that it looked like the flowers on it were real and sticking out of the painting. It was really quite impressive and I don't think I've seen anything quite like it since.
I think you could probably label the whole field of post-impressionism as just being smudgy or whatever, and it is a really easy style to copy (People have been doing it for like 100+ years now) so I can see where the idea that it's amateurish comes from. But you have to understand it came from a time where people would really deride your work if it didn't fit along established lines and that people like him really pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable to call "art" in their contemporary time.
After about the 10,000th realistic painting with vaguely mythological/religious themes, it was simply exhausting. And then we entered a room that housed Matisse's 'The Conversation' and it took my breath away.
A gigantic, bright blue painting in an old Russian palace after a week of gallery hopping...it was absolutely majestic. I can only imagine the impact something like that must have had on people who had known nothing but the same old realistic style.
What throws me about Van Gogh, though, is that unlike Matisse, he's not entirely modern or abstract - he's still trying to capture some semblance of reality, and he's even making an attempt at realistic perspective, but something is just off. I admire the style, but I could never come to grips with what he's trying to do (or not trying to do) with his perspectives.
EDIT: I find this really interesting: a visual timeline of how his relationship with alcohol changed his artistic style in various phases of his life: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/536428/fpsyt-11-0...
When it comes to his understanding of perspective, Van Gogh was so obsessed with realism that he never drew from imagination and even used/invented his own physical perspective grid to check his work.
And for why his work might appear "amateurish": this was a deliberate style choice by Van Gogh. He was a person who wanted to disguise his expertise. In one of his letters, he notes to a fellow artist that he wants his work to draw people in who "swear he has no technique" and be so "savant" that his work almost appears naive and does not "reek of its cleverness". He's trying to fool us.
He didn't have expertise. Maybe you are thinking of Picasso?
“The rules of perspective seem not to have been accurately applied throughout the painting, but this was a deliberate choice. Vincent told Theo in a letter that he had deliberately ‘flattened’ the interior and left out the shadows so that his picture would resemble a Japanese print”
We’re several hundred years past that anyway, with Picasso and those random paint splatter paintings.
But to give the science explanation, Van Gogh made impressionist paintings, the goal of which is to create and ambiance, an atmosphere of an impression the artist felt when creating the painting.
Finally, if you study great art you’ll see none of them have correct perspective. Van gogh just shoved it in your face. But having 100% correct perspective is a very amateur quality in itself
"Waldemar On The Life Of Vincent Van Gogh"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=365r2m7_B10
Waldemar is awesome, Van Gogh's life is much more interesting than I ever thought.
Also highly recommend all of Waldemar's other "Perspective" videos. You will no longer be a noob. These are definitely from his perspective- it's all about Mary Magdalene with Waldemar.