Latest posts by michael wilson (see all)
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After many, many years I still don’t feel we properly understand Van Gogh and his work. Understanding Van Gogh, realizing what were his motivations, what were his intentions and what were the unfortunate outcomes will help us relate to the whole body of his work. The song says that he was a candle in the wind which is so very, very true. He only began to paint when he was twenty-seven and then produced all of his work in just a decade. They say he committed suicide but there is evidence that a teenage boy shot him in the abdomen and Vincent managed to get back to his room where he died in his own bed. The flame of his life he must have sensed, was intense but doomed to be short-lived.
There were days when he produced two and even three paintings. He completed an astonishing number of paintings within a ten year span – some twelve hundred. The bulk of these were painted in the last several years of his life. There are just a few references to the real reasons behind his eventual insanity-those which point to the absolute absorption in his work. In my attempt to understand Van Gogh I have come to a few conclusions:
The man had come to live within the contexts of his paintings, that is the reality that he represented in his paintings was more vivid, more real, more tangibe and yes, more understandable than the reality he was painting. His comprehension of any particular scene was accelerated by his interpretation.
We all know that Van Gogh was a voracious reader and writer as well. He was an intelligent man who could have done any number of things for a vocation.
He would not nor could not know just where the act of painting might take him. What did in fact begin to happen is that he chose more and more to live within the realities he had created. They were where he had made his discoveries, they were the elements that caused him to understand himself and life itself. What we think of reality itself, became for Vincent Van Gogh a particular consciousness that eluded him. It was only by defining it or reinterpreting was he able to find the core essential reality he sought for. Depending on your slant he either had found his escape or he was in the midst of discovering his salvation.
I do think Vincent Van Gogh was suffering from other physio-psychological factors, certain chemical imbalances, apparent physical challenges that helped to spiral him into untenable circumstances. It is important however to consider the broader reasons that compelled him initially and then urged him on through an intense period of creativity. When he realized what he could discover within the realms of art, the observation of nature forces, the life that seemed to surge behind a brooding portrait, Vincent Van Gogh decided this could very well be the consciousness that I seek, the reality that I have been searching for. He began to dream of painting. Forms became for him potential brushstrokes. He experienced everything in terms of interpreting by paint and canvas his impressions. These new discoveries overwhelmed him. It is said that one of the reasons he would drink Absinthe at night was to try and calm the fever of his compulsion, not to forestall depression.
There are very few Van Goghs now available to see in galleries unless you go to the one that houses most of his work in Amsterdam. They command enormous amounts of money. They tell us about the painter perhaps more directly than any other painter in History. He is not hiding behind his paintings. There is no subterfuge in his work. They burst with life, with energy and with great feeling and compassion. It is my feeling that ultimately, especially the last two years of his life when his output was enormous, he literally transferred his reality and that reality became ‘encapsulated’ within the dimensions of each canvas. Painting by painting he was building his own, private reality. From there he imagined he would be able to see clearly…he would be able to live and function in some kind of compatibility with the world around him. He became consumed with the idea, his health degenerated and ultimately he was unable to straddle those two different realities. I expect that any understanding he would gather from a new painting followed long after it’s execution. There was always then a frantic catch-up, before one painting had been digested and considered he was off to make some new discovery, some new attenuation. If perhaps he had been in closer contact with friends, some of this urgency might have been tempered – that is hard to say. Many things could perhaps have turned out better. Theo died one year before Vincent and this inevitably was the final and abrupt curve that ‘the other reality’ had thrown him. His financial support had ended. His life-line had ended, Theo was his devoted brother and his confidant but only so far as a letter could be written and returned. Vincent wrote hundreds of letters attempting to reach out and make a connection. In the end he sold only one painting.
It is my opinion that Vincent Van Gogh knew things were spiraling out of control. I don’t think he saw any good, alternative direction. If in fact he had been shot by that teenage boy and had stumbled back to his room, his thoughts may well have been that the mortal wound had come at just about the right time. He had been able to make manifest his discoveries by painting over 1,200 paintings and drawings, but he was not able to properly, emotionally or mentally place them within the context that he desired. Those purposes, deep and hidden and personally important to him were largely in fragments around him. He was unable to piece them together in to a workable whole. I think we are universally intrigued and even fascinated with his paintings because we have an affinity for the artist who attempts to unmask the world around us, the artist who helps us see the human condition, the artist who looks with compassion on our toils and our loneliness. It is often loneliness or even the fear of loneliness that occupy the thoughts of so many. No one understood this more deeply than Van Gogh. That fact is apparent in his emotional paintings. We are drawn to that level of compassion. This is his great gift to us. If he was unable to take apart and understand the real essence of his discoveries, painting by painting then it is up to us to unravel the brilliance that occurred over just one, obscure decade many years ago. This is certainly something we will want to review in the very near future.