"The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me"

John Dyer signals an artistic lineage that privileges color as an emotional language and painting as a vehicle for wonder. Van Gogh offers him permission to turn up the chroma until feeling becomes visible, sunflowers burning with interior fire, night skies pulsating with motion, fields and villages pressed into patterns of rhythm and light. That approach gives Dyer a foundation for his own vivid Cornish and tropical scenes, where gardens, coastlines, and festivals feel charged with life rather than merely recorded. From Van Gogh he can borrow the courage to let paint carry heat, wind, scent, and heartbeat.

Chagall brings another register: the poetic, weightless world where memory, myth, and love float above rooftops. Dyer’s compositions often share a similar delight in symbolism and narrative play, birds, boats, moons, and flowers forming constellations of meaning. Chagall’s flattened space and lyrical distortion show how a painting can honor truth without obeying strict realism; Dyer uses that license to weave community, flora, and celebration into images that feel both immediate and dreamlike.

Together these influences map onto Dyer’s characteristic clarity and accessibility. Van Gogh’s direct brushwork and farm-country empathy, Chagall’s folktale tenderness and spiritual shimmer, both artists dignify ordinary life while lifting it toward the universal. Dyer echoes that generosity in scenes that welcome viewers rather than intimidate them, a democratic colorism that invites participation. The “big influence” is as much ethical as stylistic: sincerity over cynicism, sensation over detachment, joy without apology.

There is also a practical inheritance. Van Gogh’s emphatic mark becomes Dyer’s graphic silhouettes and saturated planes; Chagall’s compositional buoyancy becomes Dyer’s celebratory scattering of motifs across a canvas. Influenced by these predecessors, he treats landscape as biography and community as chorus, translating weather, music, and shared ritual into luminous pattern. Naming Van Gogh and Chagall is a way of situating his work within a continuum of expressive colorists who turn the visible world into felt experience, and of affirming painting’s enduring power to make life glow.