The film ‘Loving Vincent’ is a quest to find how Van Gogh kept himself inspired through relentless disappointments, writes PIYUSH ROY
Vincent Van Gogh, one afternoon while painting a landscape, forgot about his lunch lying cold by his colour palette. A crow came and started nibbling at it. The artist stopped. The reaction was unusual, because Vincent rarely paused while painting. But that day he just kept watching the crow — as a welcome coming close of some living being. His eyes gleamed, he was hooked and happy. A boatman who had regularly seen him at work, wondered, ‘How lonely the man must have been to get so excited by the sight of a dirty crow going about its daily chores….’
Vincent Willem Van Gogh (1853- 1890), the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, ranks among the most famous and influential figures in western Art. His signature use of bold colours and dramatic, expressive brushwork is the foundation on which stands the experimental edifice of modern art.
In just over a decade of incessant working, Vincent had created nearly 2,100 artworks, including over 800 paintings. His Portrait Of Dr Gatchet, his personal doctor, had sold for a record $82.5 million (in 1990) to be the highest bidded artwork in the history of art, until then. In his lifetime, he had managed to sell only one — The Red Vineyard for 400 francs. He died, little better than a pauper, living off on the sponsorship of his art dealer brother, Theo. Vincent shot himself at the age of 37. Death too, didn’t come easy. He walked back to his hotel with the injury, smoked his pipe and died two days later. His last words were — ‘the sadness will last forever’.
Posterity diagnosed him as a misunderstood genius, a patient of bipolar disorder, a troubled personality, a tragic painter, a tortured artist….His fraternity in 2017, offered him a unique tribute — the world’s first fully painted film, Loving Vincent. Each of its 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh, a hand-painted labour of love created by over 100 painters.
Drawing upon his letters to Theo, the film is constructed around the drama of the delivery of his last letter to the ‘right’ recipient. The opportunity is used by the film’s protagonist — a curious letter bearer — to explore what could have driven him to suicide. Gradually, it morphs into a quest of finding how Van Gogh kept himself inspired through relentless disappointments. In today’s fast-paced world of immediate gratification, it would be impossible to believe that such a man did exist, who just kept creating masterpiece after masterpiece sans any appreciation.
Vincent, in a prophetic self-review, had stated, ‘Who am I in the eyes of most people. A nobody, a nonentity, an unpleasant person. Someone who has not, and never will have, any position in society, in short, the lowest of the low. Well then, even if that was all absolutely true, one day I would like to show by my work, what this nobody has in his heart’.
Art cannot be inspiring if it is created with commerce, profit, sales or audience applause in mind. A work of ageless creativity cannot happen without a stimulating state of joy, confidence and personal satisfaction guiding its creator.
Did Vincent end his life because he could foresee that his creativity was going to lose its bold spontaneity and newness? Did he script his death, as a last hurrah to have the world wake up to take note of his masterpieces before they got lost?
Did he change his mind and wish to live instead, after attempting a cheat date with death? He lived two more days to his death after the self-inflicted gunshot. Why didn’t he let himself be saved?
We will never know. Moreover, will that knowledge help us better know the person, as one of his first fans, the daughter of Gatchet, asks in the film, ‘You know so much about his death, what do you know of his life?’
A kinder world would perhaps have let Vincent live longer. But would it have been a living worth his while? His survival was possible because of the unflinching support of his brother. Theo could have managed a good life for himself — but he sacrificed it to invest in his brother’s creativity, despite no returns in either’s lifetimes.
When the world is in doubt, a creative person needs at least one support, closer home. Many Van Goghs haven’t materialised because the world was successful in convincing their home to not let their true self bloom. They eventually wasted their spark by returning to the secure grind of the mundane instead. The patronage of the genius has rarely been convenient. But are the vicissitudes of failure and a state of continuous hunger better catalysts to keep the fire of an artist shine longer vis-à-vis the ‘extinguishing’ comforts of success?
Seven wealthy towns claimed a Homer dead; they also were those very places through which the famed poet-philosopher of ancient Greece, when alive, had begged his daily bread. Loving Vincent is as much a triumph of a creative person’s obstinate insistence to create at any cost, as a tragic reminder of the society’s recurrent ignorance down the centuries towards talents in their lifetime — Homer, Confucius, Galileo, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Van Gogh… On his ‘sorry’ life, Vincent had once reflected, I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process’.
Great artists are never peaceful souls within. Is it then too much to ask their families and the societies they live in, to give them some peace outside? The writer is a critic, curator and film scholar.
Loving Vincent, 2017
Language: English
Duration: 94 minutes
Technique: Oil-painting animation
Director: Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman
Cast (Voice): Robert Gulaczyk, Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn
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