Van Gogh is saying something rather radical here: that loving people isn't a distraction from art—it *is* the substance of art itself. Most of us assume artists need solitude and detachment to create something meaningful, yet he understood that the impulse to truly see another person, to attend to their particularity rather than reduce them to a type, is the same impulse that makes a portrait or a story worth experiencing. When a nurse sits with a dying patient and simply listens without trying to fix or improve them, she's doing what Van Gogh called artistic—the work of attention and care that refuses to look away.