Art & Creativity Quote by Bill Griffith

The joke lands because it’s equal parts confession and self-skewering: Griffith frames a career detour as a youthful act of myth-chasing, then punctures it with a single, surgically placed “Jr.” Van Gogh is the patron saint of suffering-for-art narratives, the secular halo every ambitious art kid tries on at least once. By calling himself “Vincent Van Gogh Jr,” Griffith doesn’t just admit to a “romantic vision”; he exposes its derivative nature. Even his dream of originality comes pre-packaged, a hand-me-down legend.

The line also dramatizes a long-running cultural hierarchy: comics as the scrappy, unserious cousin of “fine art.” “Abandoned comics” implies a perceived upgrade, the climb from popular craft to museum legitimacy. But Griffith’s phrasing suggests he already knows the ladder is a bit of a con. The “because” is doing double duty: it offers motivation, then immediately indicts that motivation as ego and fantasy rather than formal necessity.

Context matters here: Griffith is a cartoonist from a generation that came up when comics were routinely dismissed as disposable. Many artists flirted with the gallery world to earn seriousness, grants, or permission to call themselves artists with a capital A. The subtext is that the Van Gogh myth - poverty, isolation, martyrdom - can become a shortcut to authenticity. Griffith’s punchline says: I wanted the aura, but I also recognized the cringe. That self-awareness is the tell. The real artistic maturity isn’t in choosing “fine art” over comics; it’s in seeing how status narratives manipulate the choice in the first place.