Sexuality in the Arts

I spent last weekend in the country amidst vast agricultural fields, 30 minutes from any small town.  Sunflowers littered every dirt road and field, bordering everything.  For many reasons, Vincent Willem van Gogh kept queueing up in my mind. 

What was it like for Van Gogh to live in his era? 

I’m fascinated by how, despite extensive artistic training, Van Gogh resisted the straight and narrow.  There are no “rulers” or straight lines used in his artistic expressions.

He threw nothing away.  He disrespected nothing in the worlds he created.  He crafted magic into everything.

There are no exclusive “good parts” to his most well known illustrations.  Unlike modern illustrations that create more focus or detail at the points of emphasis, Van Gogh’s imagery is beautiful from edge to edge, from up close to the infinite horizons, from large to small, and from “important” to “trivial.”

It’s as if Van Gogh was saying to everyone else in his era who was painting beautiful cherubs, pretty ponies, and royalties:  You don’t think there is beauty in everything around you?  I will paint ordinary wooden chairs, a poor person’s bedroom, billiard halls, the most common of flowers, and old men - and show you as much beauty as you’ve ever seen.  

(Click on images to view them larger and in clearer detail.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_D%C3%A9coration_for_the_Yellow_House

I think some people have gone insane because they were far ahead of their culture’s sensibilities.  The constant friction and conflict between the beauty in their mind and ugliness of their culture’s misplaced ideals - has probably driven some geniuses into madness.

In a Van Gogh painting, everything is beautiful.  Every blade of grass and clump of mud.  The Earth is as beautiful as the women.  Buildings are as lovely as the flowers.  The night sky is as lovely as the stars.

I imagine he thought:   I will show you common people doing undesirable and ordinary things and give you imagery infused with life, humanity, and pathos.

As children, most of us are taught to not look directly into the Sun because it will hurt our eyes.  If you look back at several of the paintings above, I get the sense Van Gogh ignored that advice, and instead gazed straight into the Sun.  He tried to portray its energy at dawn, dusk, night and full light.  And when the Sun was hidden by night, he painted whatever lights embered against the loneliness of night.

He wrote to his sister, “It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch.  But I like to paint the thing immediately . . . even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges”

I speculate he might have thought to himself:  I may not be able to be sane within the constraints and frameworks of modern religious ideas and philosophies, and I may not be able to capture the beauty of heaven - but I CAN show you more beauty than you’ve seen before here on Earth.

Still Life with Absinthe:

He may have even thought:  I’ll even paint my often rejected and unadored face and reveal more to you about my psyche, intellect, and pains than any of my ‘modern’ doctors in the asylums I’ve been interned in or any ‘intellectual’ preacher could ever tell you about me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portraits_by_Vincent_van_Gogh

He lost his ear.  But it is possible he found it difficult to live with or without his gifted abilities to see.

About Eugène Delacroix’s Tasso in the Hospital of S. Anna, Ferrara, Van Gogh wrote, “But it would be more in harmony with what Eugène Delacroix attempted and brought off in his Tasso in Prison, and many other pictures, representing a real man.  Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.”

Of his Portrait of Dr. Gachet, he wrote:  “I’ve done the portrait of M. Gachet with a melancholy expression, which might well seem like a grimace to those who see it . . . Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done . . . There are modern heads that may be looked at for a long time, and that may perhaps be looked back on with longing a hundred years later.” 

I love the theme of his paintings when he was held in asylums, and all he could do was paint masterpieces with broader perspectives than the walls and people around him.

Van Gogh shows me things that had always surrounded me, but I had never seen as beautifully before.  He humbles me, reminding me of what I have yet to see, and what I may never be able to see.   His work encourages me to never stop aspiring.   He suggests I’d be deluding myself if I thought I’d seen or understood all the beauty in any person or thing.

If you admire Van Gogh’s possible intents, drives, hard work, and ideas - ideas that flew in the face of most everything around him, then: 

If you ever think you see something beautiful or unrecognized in someone or something, consider taking the time to attempt to share some of that beauty and intelligence with others.

And also, make sure you communicate to those people your admiration of their worths.

Let them know before they go.

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