PIYUSH ROY
Vincent van Gogh, one afternoon while painting a landscape, forgot about his lunch lying cold by his colour palette. A crow came by and started nibbling at his food. The artist stopped painting. The reaction was unusual; because Vincent rarely paused while painting. But that day he just kept watching the crow – as a welcome coming close of some living being. His eyes gleamed, he was hooked and happy. A boatman who had regularly seen him at work, wondered, ‘How lonely the man must have been to get so excited by the sight of a dirty crow just going about its daily chores…’
Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853 –1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. Today, he ranks among the most famous and influential figures in Western Art. His signature use of bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork is the foundation on which stands the grand, experimental edifice of modern art.
In just over a decade of incessant working at the cost of grave personal health, Vincent had created nearly 2,100 artworks, including over 800 paintings. His ‘Portrait of Dr. Gatchet’ his personal doctor, and lone confidant in his last days had sold for a record 82.5 million dollars (in 1990) to be the highest bided artwork in the history of art, until then.
Vincent had managed to sell just one painting in his entire lifetime – ‘The Red Vineyard’ for 400 francs. He died, little better than a pauper, living off on the sponsorship doles of his art dealer brother, Theo. Vincent shot himself at the age of 37. Even death didn’t go easy on him. He walked back to his hotel with the injury, smoked his pipe and died two days later. His last words were –‘the sadness will last forever…’
Posterity has diagnosed him as a misunderstood genius, a patient of bipolar disorder and mental illness, a troubled personality, a tragic painter, a tortured artist…
He also is the subject of a unique tribute by 100 artists from all over the globe – in the world’s first fully painted film, Loving Vincent. Its every frame is a hand-painted labour of love by a grateful fraternity.
I recently saw the film at a screening at this year’s MAMI International Film Festival in Mumbai. It got multiple rounds of spontaneous applause by an awed audience at different moments through the film. Drawing upon his many letters to Theo, the film is constructed around the drama of the delivery of his last letter to a worthyrecipient. The ruse is used by the film’s protagonist – a curious letter bearer – to explore what could have drove him to suicide.
That shock premise however is soon let gone to get some understanding, though a century late, into the daily drivers of an under-appreciated genius and find answers as to how could he keep himself inspired through a decade of relentless disappointments.In today’s fast-paced world of immediate gratification it would be impossible to believe that such a man did exist, who just kept creating masterpiece after masterpiece sans any appreciation.
Vincent in a prophetic self-reviewhad stated, ‘Who am I in the eyes of most people. A nobody, a non-entity, an unpleasant person. Someone who has not, and never will have, any position in society, in short, the lowest of the low. Well then, even if that was all absolutely true, one day I would like to show by my work, what this nobody has in his heart’.
Art cannot be inspiring if it is created with commerce, profit, sales or audience applause in mind. A work of ageless creativitycannot happen without a stimulating state of joy, confidence and personal satisfactionguiding its creator.
French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard had once said that ‘artists should stop creating at 35. After that they just turn into intellectual farts’.
Did Vincent end his life because he could foresee that his creativity was going to lose its bold spontaneity and the freshness of the new?
Did he script his death, as a last hurrah to have the world shock wake-up and take note of his every masterpiece before they got lost?
Did he change his mind and wishto live instead, after attempting a cheat date with death? He lived two more days to his death after the self-inflicted gunshot. Why didn’t he let himself be saved?
We will never know. Moreover, will that knowledge help us better know the person, as one of his first fans, the daughter of Dr. Gatchet, asks in the film, ‘You know so much about his death, what do you know of his life…’
A kinder world would perhaps have let Vincent live longer. But would it have been a living worth his while?
A stand out feature in the happening of ‘Vincent Van Gogh’ was the complete trust and faith in his prowess by a close family member. His survival was possible because of the unflinching support of his brother. Theocould have managed a good life for himself – but he sacrificed it to invest in his brother’s creativity, despite no initial returns in either’s lifetimes.
When the world is in doubt, a creative person needs at least one support closer home. Many Van Goghs haven’t materialised because the world was successful in convincing their home to not let their true self bloom. They eventually wasted their spark by returning to the secure grind of the mundane instead.
The patronage of the genius has rarely been convenient.But are the vicissitudes of failure and a state of continuous hunger in the belly better catalysts to keep the fire of an artist shine longer vis-à-vis the extinguishing comforts of success?
Seven wealthy towns claimed a Homer dead; they also were those very places through which the famed poet-philosopher of ancient Greece, when alive, had begged his daily bread.
Loving Vincent is as much a triumph of a creative person’s obstinate insistence to create at any cost, as a tragic reminder of the society’s recurrent ignorance down the centuries towards talents in their lifetime – Homer, Confucius, Galileo Galilei, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Vincent van Gogh… On his ‘sorry’ life, Vincent had once reflected, ‘I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process’.
Great artists are never peaceful souls within. But can’t their families and the societies they live in give them some peace outside?
