Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 33
Artists are not crazy, no matter what they say
by
Joan Altabe
I’m tired of hearing people say that artists are out of their heads. How about you?
Consider the artist most famous for being insane, Vincent Van Gogh. Remember Kirk Douglas' raving-lunatic portrayal of the painter in the 1956 film biography Lust for Life? The actor played him as an outcast, isolated from people as if separated by a field of electronic force, attacking his easel with the same ferocity he used to portray his strike against the Germans in Paths of Glory.
Van Gogh got a bad rap in that movie. His roommate, Paul Gauguin, unwittingly makes the point. "I don't admire the painting," Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh's work, "but I admire the man. He's so confident, so calm. I'm so uncertain, so uneasy."
For me, proof of Van Gogh's sanity was his output – more than 2000 oil paintings, 100 watercolors and 200 letters to fellow artists and his brother – in French and English, as well as Dutch. As everyone knows, when depression hits or tantrums occur, it's hard to get any work done. Van Gogh's exceptional production level suggests mental health, not to mention exceptional discipline.
Then there's the care of his brushes – characteristically encrusted with thick paint, given his love of applying pigment in globs. He didn't have money to buy new brushes. Painting every day, he had to clean them after each use before the pigment dried on them. It's hard to imagine someone out of control doing such housekeeping every day, let alone painting some of art history's more gorgeous works.
But the biggest clue pointing to Van Gogh's sanity, as far as I'm concerned, is what he shows us in his 35 self-portraits (he couldn't afford models), in which you see a man with thick, sandy hair and whisk-broom beard gazing at the viewer with a steady, steely self-possession.
OK, sure there are discordant greens in the face and garish red in the hair that lends the image a clamorous air. But that was Van Gogh telling us how he was feeling, without losing his balance.
Look especially to the eyes: streams of gold in the dark. Wise little eyes; sad, too, and wary (he had epileptic fits). But they are the sensitive, inquiring eyes of an artist.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Van Gogh's self-portraits show the calm visage of a Buddha, albeit more energetic.
And while his face seems never to have known a smile, and his mouth may strike one as obstinate, such aspects signify less a loon and more a no-nonsense fellow who doesn't follow, but who blazes his own trail, who breaks out of the lineup and dares to be different.
Van Gogh brought something new to portrait painting: the use of color to convey expression. If he had any tensions, he redirected them into paint. He considered himself a lucky man. As he said in a letter to his brother Theo: "In my opinion, I am rich – because I have found in my work something which I can devote myself to heart and soul, and which inspires me and gives meaning to my life."
Why, then, did he take his own life? Likely it was his epilepsy, which dogged him, and syphilis. Maybe these ills also had something to do with that business of his ear, too. One can’t do the hard work of being an artist and be crazy.
— by Joan Altabe | July 20, 2007
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