On Partially Watching LOVING VINCENT, the film

I was really just enjoying the rain that just stopped this morning. It tied into my partial viewing of the film LOVING VINCENT last night. There was a scene in the movie that shows, in Van Gogh brushstrokes, which are hyper-animated, Van Gogh painting in the rain—there is a lightning flash—as if to denote the inspiration, and I woke up to the rain falling this morning and felt like writing. The rain, as an ablution, has most likely always been associated with writing in that it could represent a cleansing or baptism or acceptance of the procreative soil and everything organic. Just thinking of an image of raindrops falling off of giant petals or leaves of rain forest plants is indulgent and fertile. I think that painting in the way that Van Gogh did was also a lot like “rain”, and I feel that maybe the emotional tumults he had were like storms, as such. Of course, the rain also brings flood, cataclysm, death, and possibly overwhelming psychological issues which can result in suicide.

The first time I ever went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw several works of Vincent Van Gogh. I remember I was in this one gallery space, and I was surrounded by thirty-or-so Japanese children, maybe a bunch of eight year olds (?) and their teacher, and I was staring into a small painting of his, and I just started crying. I am not sure where this impulse came from. I think that a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had only seen his work in art journals, textbooks, online image searches, etc. However, when you stand in front of one of his paintings, and it is small enough to fit under your shirt (because, you DO want to steal it), it becomes a very ominous and emotional stimulus. You can see the frenetic pathology in his strokes. The thickness of the paints and the textures in some movements versus the subtle moments as well. I wonder if he ever thought that little kids learning about art from Asia would be running around a room talking about his art (I think they were?) while some guy from Alabama, USA was crying over it? I have thought over the past few years about why I had that reaction. I went there to see Sigmar Polke and Jackson Pollock, but those guys did not make me weep.

The movie reminded me of this moment, which occurred I think around 2005. I think part of it also crushed me as a poet and aspiring writer. How you can just start off with a sketch, a note, a few small lines, but, if you stick it out, you end up with a lexicon, a book, and if nothing else at ALL, a new shaping of your cerebral cortex. Of course. Many “artists”, myself included, can get caught in a loop of patterns, but these patterns can also become our signatures. It is hard to figure out how not to stagnate and also how shredded your tether is to this world while you create so that you don’t just fall off of that edge.

If you watch this film, pay attention to the stars, the street lamps, the oil lamps in the rooms, the way light and shadows play on wine bottles, the way the sun plays on the painted oils on wheat fields at Arles. The over 100 artists who put this film together really captured the energy of this man whose ultimate fate is still up to debate according to the film—I have not finished it yet as I type this—so I do not even know the ending.

Ultimately, this is pathos, and what a pathos it is. In the wake of the growing transhumanist movement, and in the attempt for Van Gogh to leave Paris, for a variety of reasons, and try to heal in the countryside, I think that this movie, and his work, are metaphors for trying to hold on to the human ability to transmute or translate passion into an artifact which continues to deliver true human passion over centuries. Of course, I must acknowledge his so-called “mental illness”, and possibly he was just experiencing heavy metal poisoning from his, most-likely, lead-based paints and from malnutrition and alcoholism; however, he created delivery devices from the screams of Edvard Munch—don’t get me wrong, Vincent’s paintings still scream at times, but not with hopelessness under an exploded colonized psychedelic sky—they scream at YOU—they scream at you to experience your environment again beyond the paradigm of Modernism.

They scream at you,

“Why are you not painting?”

They scream at you,

“Your insanity is there whether you realize it or not, and if you do not embrace it, the world will exploit you for it until you become the worst kind of crazy…”

The kind of crazy where you no longer own yourself.
The kind of crazy sold back to you as a commodity by a culture that might only see you as an economic slave to a final actuarial table or data base mining exhibition.

And not even close to seeing you EVER
As a beautiful painting.