There was a time when the painter-to-be was inclined to join the honoured profession of one branch of his family— priesthood.
Unfortunately, his parish found his preaching to be a touch over-zealous. Van Gogh's enthusiasm would prove to be like a force of nature. Like a thunderstorm or a typhoon, his emotions were awe-inspiring displays that could easily wreak havoc and destruction. Foresaking religion, he turned to the work of another wing of the family: the art dealers. This lead to a stint in London. Some family members suspected that the bleak English weather triggered the beginning of his mental problems.
Van Gogh would then decide to become a painter and join art school, only to drop out. Dating to this period is The Skull. What was intended as a standard exercise for the novice art student seemed to bore van Gogh. He inserted a rollie cigarette into his skull’s mouth (endearing himself to generations of stoners). At this point, the apprentice still adhered to the orthodox palette of dim and muted earth colours that was in vogue at the academy. Maybe the paintings of this period appear dark and muted because there wasn't much electrical indoor lighting available.
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| The Skull |
In this style, van Gogh's master thesis in was the polemical The Potato Eaters (1885). The painting sought to dramatise the near-starvation diet of the rural peasantry. This was a time in history when the Chinese and Indians had far superior lifestyles to the average European. Peasants in many parts of Europe lived almost entirely on potatoes and, if the were lucky, a little milk. The background of The Skull is a severe black and the bone is rendered in shades of brown, raw ochre and off-white. It would be the bright white ember of the cigarette that would explode into Sunflowers.
A move to Paris, in 1886, led to encountering the impressionists— Pissarro, Monet and Gaugin— who were struggling to establish their style of painting as high art, and facing stiff resistance from the critics. Art and the artist were owned by the elite for their personal edification and the traditional idea of sacred art as spiritual communion was laughed at. Disappointed with these sort of attitudes, van Gogh moved to the country, seeking inspiration that would be earthy, natural and simple, yet beautiful and uplifting. He settled for a period in Arles and attempted to start a studio there. Here, perhaps to due to inherent factors (perhaps, the post-traumatic stress of dealing with English weather during his London stint) or the pressures he put on himself to work, van Gogh’s mind started to misfire. Despite considerable suffering, he never stopped painting. Even when voluntarily institutionalised in an asylum, van Gogh continued to work. Perhaps, painting was van Gogh’s way of keeping it together. He wanted to die but to live he needed to paint. If the drive to paint made him cut off one ear, it also kept the other one intact.
The van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is an institution committed to keeping alive the memory of the outcomes of the savant's frenzy. It is the home to which every pilgrim must undertake the haj. We owe its existence to the nephew that Almond Flowers had been painted for. Due to him and his mother, van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the family has worked tirelessly to curate and keep van Gogh’s place in history. These efforts eventually culminated in the establishment of this museum. This year, 2015 was the 125th death anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh, and the museum had many special events and exhibits commemorating the date. In the museum itself, a giant overhead panel overlooking the foyer (that serves as modernist bar-and-lounge complete with a live EDM performance) flashed pop culture homages to van Gogh’s self-portraiture. Done in signature colours of blue, yellow and orange, visitors were treated to Groundskeeper Willie of The Simpsons and a Lego Vincent van Gogh.
The van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is an institution committed to keeping alive the memory of the outcomes of the savant's frenzy. It is the home to which every pilgrim must undertake the haj. We owe its existence to the nephew that Almond Flowers had been painted for. Due to him and his mother, van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the family has worked tirelessly to curate and keep van Gogh’s place in history. These efforts eventually culminated in the establishment of this museum. This year, 2015 was the 125th death anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh, and the museum had many special events and exhibits commemorating the date. In the museum itself, a giant overhead panel overlooking the foyer (that serves as modernist bar-and-lounge complete with a live EDM performance) flashed pop culture homages to van Gogh’s self-portraiture. Done in signature colours of blue, yellow and orange, visitors were treated to Groundskeeper Willie of The Simpsons and a Lego Vincent van Gogh.
“There is no blue without yellow and orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn’t you? Oh well, you will tell me what I write to you are only banalities.”
Among these caricatures being showcased was the one that stars in the graphic novel Vincent by Barbara Stok (2014).
Stok’s friendly simple caricatures and the primary pastel colour scheme (inspired from van Gogh’s favourite colours) uses the medium of comics to lighten a life that had some very dark moments.
A comics biography of van Gogh is like a history of a history, a story about story-telling.
Van Gogh’s life told through the medium of comics naturally produces a work that anticipates it’s own heritage. Impressionism, and the movements that followed it— especially, the post-impressionists (as van Gogh himself was), pointillism, and fauvism— pioneered techniques and optical tricks, such as Ben Day dots (famously caricatured by Roy Liechtenstein) or Matisse’s experiments with cut-outs that are now a standard part of comics vocabulary (and also that of digital illustration software which is increasingly being used to make comics). Despite the dark themes explored by comics— the excesses of the powerful, war, genocide, rape, drugs and graphic violence— the silly caricatures are inherently funny. Comics are able to combine the profane and the profound in a single leap, and it was in van Gogh’s life and work that we see simultaneously the comedic and the tragic. The obsessive seriousness was balanced by an uncanny and whimsical sense of humour that irradiates his legacy. Thus, there is no doubt that in van Gogh's work we find an early vestige of the power of comics.
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| Stok’s friendly simple caricatures and the primary pastel colour scheme (inspired from van Gogh’s favourite colours) uses the medium of comics to lighten a life that had some very dark moments. |
Van Gogh’s life told through the medium of comics naturally produces a work that anticipates it’s own heritage. Impressionism, and the movements that followed it— especially, the post-impressionists (as van Gogh himself was), pointillism, and fauvism— pioneered techniques and optical tricks, such as Ben Day dots (famously caricatured by Roy Liechtenstein) or Matisse’s experiments with cut-outs that are now a standard part of comics vocabulary (and also that of digital illustration software which is increasingly being used to make comics). Despite the dark themes explored by comics— the excesses of the powerful, war, genocide, rape, drugs and graphic violence— the silly caricatures are inherently funny. Comics are able to combine the profane and the profound in a single leap, and it was in van Gogh’s life and work that we see simultaneously the comedic and the tragic. The obsessive seriousness was balanced by an uncanny and whimsical sense of humour that irradiates his legacy. Thus, there is no doubt that in van Gogh's work we find an early vestige of the power of comics.
Van Gogh said of the difficulty in bringing something out of the imagination through drawing:
“What is drawing? How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? — since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.”
From Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993), pg. 192
To encounter a van Gogh painting is like confronting a sudden apparition.
A riot unfolds— of smokey multi-coloured genies, some that look like tilted strokes and others like curls, escaping from a thousand and one lamps at the same time to inhabit and confuse the senses. Something in the mind changes. Reality shifts and we wonder if ever anything will look the same way again. This weird style of van Gogh’s has attracted a steady rise of followers since his death in 1890. From vistas like Starry Nights and the open wheat fields of the french countryside, numerous portraits and self-portraits (including that of his postman and one of himself, infamously, with bandages swaddled around his head from an attempt to remove an ear), van Gogh painted obsessively studying everything from trees, gardens, peasants, chairs, and the layout of his bedroom. Yet, my favourite of his work is the jaw-dropping Almond Flowers, 1890.
A riot unfolds— of smokey multi-coloured genies, some that look like tilted strokes and others like curls, escaping from a thousand and one lamps at the same time to inhabit and confuse the senses. Something in the mind changes. Reality shifts and we wonder if ever anything will look the same way again. This weird style of van Gogh’s has attracted a steady rise of followers since his death in 1890. From vistas like Starry Nights and the open wheat fields of the french countryside, numerous portraits and self-portraits (including that of his postman and one of himself, infamously, with bandages swaddled around his head from an attempt to remove an ear), van Gogh painted obsessively studying everything from trees, gardens, peasants, chairs, and the layout of his bedroom. Yet, my favourite of his work is the jaw-dropping Almond Flowers, 1890.
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Almond Flowers was painted to mark the birth of Theo van Gogh's son. “I never get tired of the blue sky," Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) had once written to his mother from Saint-Remy in the south of France.
The shade of intense whitish-blue, created to herald the birth of his brother Theo’s baby boy, leaves a lump in one’s throat. “I never get tired of the blue sky,” Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote to his mother from Saint-Remy in the south of France. You feel like your spirit can actually go through a van Gogh painting, transmuting into a bird, and rise, soaring high above and beyond in that sky like the faraway ravens of his wheat field paintings.
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Sadly, the artist shot himself through the chest shortly after completing that particular series of study of the wheat fields. He did not die immediately. Instead, he suffered terribly as infection set in and he succumbed to the wound only the next day.
I just feel whenever I look at one his paintings that it is van Gogh, his work as well as his life, more than anyone, that anticipates our contemporary culture’s fascination for graphic imagery. Global comics are a conversation centered around two poles: Angouleme in France and the whole of Japan. Yet, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Impressionism itself was born out of this conversation, when Japonisme was the rage in Parisian circles. Van Gogh loved Japanese art and if he were alive today, would certainly be an obsessive collector of manga, maybe be a mangakka himself.
The artist evokes the profound and the profane: high ideals; ridiculous behaviour; outrageous dedication to craft; protesting at capitalism while demanding hand-outs from his family; and giggling while suffering death. Vincent van Gogh drove himself to the blackest of despair, the darkest shades of blue funk, but he also possessed the ability to inspire hope-- his light blue backgrounds unfurl the sky itself.
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| You feel like your spirit can actually go through a van Gogh painting, transmuting into a bird, and rise, soaring high above and beyond in that sky like the faraway ravens of his wheat field paintings. |
They say Vincent van Gogh died an unrecognised genius. Very few had seen his work outside a small circle. Only one of his paintings was sold. Yet, his brother Theo was amazed by the crowds of common people who turned up for his funeral— the very people van Gogh once tried to serve as a priest and then, highlight their circumstances and viewpoint in works such as The Potato Eaters. Perhaps, the country folk understood that the gregarious, red-haired madman who they encountered painting furiously in their fields was a savant— a connection to the divine.
It is 125 years to those days of mourning.
Vincent van Gogh may not have been toasted by the Parisian art circles in his lifetime but it cannot be said, either, that the people’s painter suffered an unheralded, forgotten death. Theo wrote to their mother after the funeral:
“If he could have seen how people behaved toward me when he had left us and the sympathy of so many for himself, he would at this moment not have wanted to die.”
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