What really happened on that Starry~Starry~Night!
(An oldie but a goodie! LOL)
Pen & Watercolour Copyright 2007 Jean Burman
See? He wasn’t mad afterall… just a little “troubled” ’tis all! We knew that all along right?
In the news this week… revelations of the secret pact between Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin which secured Gauguin’s freedom from prosecution… shored up their fragile friendship… and effectively silenced the truth for all these years. History is becoming curiouser and curiouser!
Poor old Vincent… hailed a madman for the past hundred years [or so] for allegedly cutting off his own ear in a fit of madness and despair… was this week vindicated of the crime. I don’t know about you… but the revelation that it was in fact Paul Gauguin who sliced off Vincent’s ear with a sword [as you do]… as Vincent tried to stop him from leaving his little yellow house in Arles… seems so much more plausible to me. I mean for heaven’s sake… if you’re going to lose an ear for whatever reason… why not share the fun and let a friend have a “hand” in it? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth or some such? Why… even Bill Shakespeare was all for the lending of an ear to random friends romans and countrymen alike…(grin)
How their secret pact lay dormant for as long as it did under the close scrutiny of art historians and academics is beyond speculation… but someone on history keeping’s slippery slope slipped up somewhere!
I have sometimes wondered what lies ahead for artists whose work is the only thing left behind to speak for them after their death. With history in the hands of mere mortals anything could happen. And knowing the propensity we humans have for whipping up a storm of gossip, innuendo, outright lies and downright controversy [if we can at all possibly "swing it"]… and given the added penchant for art critics and commentators to “read into” a painting whatever “deeper meaning” seems appropriate to their mood at the time… well… you might agree that history would naturally become a little bit “sketchy” over time…(okay okay…pun intended)
So… with history revised… it appears that Vincent was not at all unlike the rest of us. A little mad at times perhaps… and yes granted… just a tad more talented. (grin) But tragically human all the same!
Artwork Copyright 2007 Jean Burman
In many ways we artists still “see what he saw”. And still “feel as he did”. He too struggled to keep his head above water and his heart in the right place. He ached for the companionship of kindred spirits and longed for understanding (and a modicum of recognition) from a less than sympathetic public.
History has it that he died a broken man… mentally emotionally spiritually and financially. What a joke it would now seem to him that… a century too late to pay the bills… collectors have attached a multi-million dollar price tag to the artwork of a madman! Now that he has been declared sane [even if only approximately so] it will be interesting to see if “loyalty” and not “madness” will continue to hold monetary value in the work.
Only time (and history) will tell.
And we already know how transient and unreliable that can be!
Hope you like the re-worked website. Finally. But not final at all. This place will be a work in progress for a little while yet to come. Any comments/suggestions will be gratefully received!
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