Vincent, could you have imagined?

Thanks to heatherleys.blogspot.com

Self-Portrait, 1889

Thanks to vggallery.com

Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Paul Gauguin), 1888.

Thanks to vggallery.com

I was forwarded a link to this blog which explained the work:

When asked about this project [John] Dean explained he originally set out to make a single monochrome bust. He says he was intrigued by an enigmatic self-portrait painted in Arles in September 1888 which Vincent intended to send to Paul Gauguin. ‘Van Gogh’s distinctive draughtsmanship and his technique of applying thick pigment to the canvas was almost sculptural. The image seemed to be yearning to be liberated from the two dimensional surface restraining it. I wanted to find out what might happen if it were released’ said Dean.

Thanks to heatherleys.blogspot.com

Self-Portrait, 1888.

Thanks to vggallery.com

Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1887-1888.

Thanks to vggallery.com

I have always found Vincent’s work sculptural, but these busts seem to heighten the intensity of his gaze — and certainly the fact that they are all life-sized would add a very unique element when standing in front of them. One of these busts has been incorporated into the London exhibit of his letters (click to see several wonderful scans of his letters, with sketches).

Thanks to heatherleys.blogspot.com

Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1887.

Thanks to vggallery.com

Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889.

Thanks to vggallery.com

Even the artist’s expression seems  to divulge a kind of joyous marveling at the outcome of his work, as though he could never have dreamed the power of what he produced. From the same blog:

Once the head was made however, Dean knew that to complete it he had to incorporate the artist’s brush strokes and the striking use of colour, including yellow, turquoise and purple, from the original portrait. ‘It is unusual for a sculpture to be painted as the effect is generally merely decorative. In this case though, I realised the colours and brushwork had to be included as they were integral and essential to the work.’

I thoroughly enjoy the translation of Vincent’s impasto, or thickly laid paint, into the textural surface of these busts. I’m also a little envious of the idea of molding his face, digging my fingers into the crevices of his brushwork, and feeling and re-creating his rhythm and his facial features with my hands. It would be very close to sensation of touching his face, or perhaps touching his dream of his face…

Seeing this work reminded me of a dance I choreographed over a year ago now – it was an early experiment that proved pretty successful. One of my greatest desires with my theater piece is to translate the passion of Vincent’s methods, the speed and depth of his brushwork, the daring of his colors, into movement. As John Dean said, Vincent’s paint and images almost burst out of their frames; I think what makes people fall for Vincent’s work is that they reach toward the viewer, as opposed to other paintings that invite the viewer to look in, as though through a window. Just as Dean sought to liberate the images from their two dimensions, I seek to launch them out of their impassivity.

So today, I offer a look at one of my early forays into dances for Vincent. Three women and I worked collaboratively for three hours, and created this piece. I stayed on the outside so I could shape it, but I will be performing in my own play this summer. It was inspired by the last ten paintings Vincent created.

Reader, Vincent… enjoy. :)

(Oh, and I finished my second draft of my play last friday! Woohoo!)

But the commodification, the misinterpretation, the drama, the mythology of Van Gogh is all important, and I have eventually come to embrace it. For Vincent van Gogh created one enormous thing without a drop of intention, and that is his Myth. Van Gogh is perhaps a name with as many resonances as Ghandi, probably less than Hitler, but certainly more than FDR or Genghis Khan (and I refer to the resonances with the general population… I finally met someone who did not know who Vincent van Gogh was this past week and it about knocked my socks off). What Vincent did is in no way comparable to what these other men did, but his actions, his life, his influence has reached far and wide like a pebble’s ripple in a pool. Except that those ripples gained a force of their own, and continue to roar across cultural oceans.

What I love to look at now are the many iterations, the many re-fashionings and re-imaginings of Vincent/Van Go, and smile at the infinitely deep well of inspiration this man has become. He has become much greater than he ever could have imagined – he is sometimes so immense I wonder if I will ever know him all. As I once wrote in my journal: His life was the birth of a universe in an egg shell. I still believe that whole heartedly.

From Halloween costumes (this one is particularly well done)

Thanks to wtfcostumes.com

to NASA comparing the illumination of interstellar dust around this star to one of his paintings

Thanks to hubblesite.org

to hotel suites modeled after his paintings

Thanks to design.nl

to credit cards

Thanks to tagesanzeiger.ch

to shoes with quotes from his letters on them,

and cartoons,

Thanks to neatorama.com and bizzaro.com

and dolls with removable ears

Thanks to philosophersguild.com

or removable heads

Thanks to baronbob.com

to books (an Amazon search reveals almost 2,000) and movies (Amazon shows 22 results for movies and television, but I’m sure there are more out there that one cannot buy) and short films ranging from the more realist Vincent’s Final Moments to the surrealist Vincent and Absinthe

to the iPhone application Yours, Vincent which puts his letters and sketches at your fingertips

Thanks to iphonespies.com

to University investigations into which star Vincent painted in The White House at Night, 1890

Thanks to hermitagemuseum.org

(it was Venus, and it was precisely in that spot the night he painted it, by the way)

to songs, both the lesser known and the famous –

It becomes irrefutable that Vincent is a universe, a mountain worth climbing and full of ever-branching caverns. I am lucky enough to consider myself an explorer of all things that trace their root to him. The portrayals of this man and his work in all its iterations are not necessarily historically accurate, but they reflect what Vincent van Gogh truly means to those that reflect him back at the world and inevitably spread his words, his paintings, his life to those that did not know him at all.

In this way, Vincent van Gogh is still very much alive to me. He is an idea, a spirit that is still developing, still changing, still reaching out…

I.
Smooth silky serpentine
Swirl of the tongue
Of the brush
Around and over under
Just up over the back of my ear
Wet
Salacious
Voluminous
Tickling me with
Color-saturation

Vibrant forceful virile
Thing
Like the crest of a wave
Overtaking you
Turning you over and around
In its insides
Like a lick of fire
Singeing the hairs on your neck
Yet you are inside the wet
Inside the insides
Like pins pricking
and daggers dragging
spilling your blood into the
mixture until
you are both
Inside Outside
Consumed Consuming
and we are dancing
swimming
rolling
fucking
eating each other alive

II.
You roll me around in your mouth
like nothing
like tumbleweed on rolling hills
and I fall deep into your chasms
and I bounce
Flying -
Fiercely -
Over your peaks

with long, wet, heavy seaweed arms
you wrap around me
and pull me over under into
your water dreams
the surface of which
impacts me with a bruising
strength
A slap in the
face
in the body

I’d go tumbling backwards
but your tendrils
yank me through
as though fastened to my
skeleton directly

There is no escape
From you
As you apply me to your canvas
Like paste
And string me through
Your fingers
I am your liquid color

And you will shape me use me
At your will
You layer me on thick
Or let me just barely drift on
Stretching
Till there is nothing left but a drop
A trace left
And then I am gone

You fill me
You buoy me
And then unravel me
into
nothing more
than
a sigh

I wrote the above poem just over two years ago, in reaction to these paintings. It was the first time Vincent elicited poetry from me, and it would not be the last. In fact, it is my favorite way to respond to him. Or as I once put it, I write back to him.

What some people do not know about Vincent, and something I surely did not know, was that he was a voracious reader. In one letter from June of 1880 he compares writing and painting, as he saw them as linked, and perhaps two of the highest art forms.

But you see, there are several things that are to be believed and to be loved; there’s something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare and something of Correggio or Sarto in Michelet, and something of Delacroix in V. Hugo, and in Beecher Stowe there’s something of Ary Scheffer. And in Bunyan there’s something of M. Maris or of Millet, a reality more real than reality, so to speak, but you have to know how to read him; then there are extraordinary things in him, and he knows how to say inexpressible things; and then there’s something of Rembrandt in the Gospels or of the Gospels in Rembrandt, as you wish, it comes to more or less the same, provided that one understands it rightly, without trying to twist it in the wrong direction, and if one bears in mind the equivalents of the comparisons, which make no claim to diminish the merits of the original figures.

If now you can forgive a man for going more deeply into paintings, admit also that the love of books is as holy as that of Rembrandt, and I even think that the two complement each other. [full letter]

The first time I really saw Vincent nearly four years ago in the Musée d’Orsay, my instinctive reaction was that we saw the world similarly, and that… as ballsy as it may sound, I write like he paints. I think what I really saw was that we had similar spirits and similar goals with our work. A passionate, spiritual non-fiction, if you will. For Vincent insisted on always painting from life, in fact on occasion he destroyed paintings that he had not painted from life because of that very fact. Except for the short period of time where Gauguin convinced him to do otherwise, Vincent was a man of the actual, the real, but also about reaching something higher… I have always felt the same about my poetry and my prose. And so, in this project, I try to reflect Vincent. I try to exchange paint for words.

I hope you enjoyed the poem, Reader. Now, I return back to my sisyphean task (as least that’s how it often feels) of composing a first draft of my play by the end of the month. I think I can in fact do it, but it will take an enormous amount of effort this week.

So, I speak to myself and to all my fellow artists out there now when I say… onwards!