Art

The mad artist who never stopped painting

Art is passion. Art is a passion for those who make it and for those who look at it.

When you create you are absorbed, you don’t realize the time passing, you don’t need a human near, you are preoccupied with just creating, you even forget about yourself.

When you view art, you are absorbed into someone else’s creation, you search for meaning, for your own vision, for an answer, as small as it may be. Art is freedom, the freedom to create, to dream for the impossible and to put it on paper, to look at it, and to search for your own imagination.

Such freedom may be what Vincent Van Gogh searched for. Is it so that madness is a prison or maybe the freedom of the mind? What is interesting is that the mad painter, Van Gogh, never forgot to follow his passion, painting, even when he had his first breakdown, on the 23rd of December 1888. On that night Van Gogh cut his ear and sent it to a lady companion, named Rachel. Signs of his personality disorder are found in his borderline behavior. On the one hand, he had a strong religious fanaticism and on the other hand, he had failed love experiences. He was also deeply disappointed in life and felt non-integrated in his own environment.

About all these sufferings he wrote to his brother before the “ear” incident. He said that his deep disappointment is caused by the “despair in which I live due to failure of each action I undertook so far and for which I deserve a thousand reprimands”.

Despite his bouts of madness, Van Gogh never stopped painting. His famous Starry night was completed a year after, in June 1889. That for me is proof that no matter how lost a painter is he will never lose his passion for art, he might lose his mind, but he will never lose his talent.

In the period he painted this masterpiece he was confined to the Saint Remy Asylum. The painting represents an impressive demonstration of the uniqueness of how he perceives and interprets nature. In that period at Saint Remy, he lost his faith so in order to find the inner peace he used to paint at night.

Van Gogh might be the artist who best represents the myth of misunderstood genius, a genius that could never paint in such a way if he had been a normal person and not a mad man.