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Being Vincent

  • Published: 2023-06-10 11:02
  • Updated: 2024-01-22 18:12

I originally wrote synthesized from various sources a while ago. It’s now a companion piece of Why I refuse the concept of art.

A boy is born into a family of theologists and art dealers. A girl born into a religious, and prosperous family. Coming from similar sets of values and status, boy and girl met. They marry in their early 30s. A year later, they lose their first child—a boy. Sticking to dutch naming traditions1, they name the stillborn boy after his grandfather. And bury him behind their house.

Only a year later, they give birth to a son again. Following the tradition, he is named after his grandfather, too. Growing up next to a grave. With a headstone casting his name.

For the sake of this exploration: you are this boy. Your name is Vincent. Imagine growing up next to a grave with your name written on it:

How would you—as a child—make sense of that? And what would you need to do so?

Your mother gives birth to your brother and your three sisters. At this point, your mom developed a religiously rigid character. Following her duty to uphold the families’ high social status.

For obvious reasons, you become a serious and thoughtful child. Your mother encourages you to draw. At the age of 11, your parents abandon place you in a boarding school. Your need to return home remains unattended. Instead, you’re being sent to middle school at the age of 13.

Where your expressive drawings of unhappiness are met by your art teacher. Himself a successful artist. Whose philosophy around ‘rejecting technique in favor of impressionism' bears no fruit for you. At 15, you’re forced to escape the “austere, cold and sterile” setting. To support your family in times of financial struggle.

What did you learn about ‘art’ at school? And how did it possibly make you feel about your own creative work?

Dealing with art, falling apart

Your fluency with French, German, English and your native language—Dutch—becomes your asset. You start working for your uncle, an art dealer, for a reknown art broking company.

At 20, you move to London to work for the company. Where you earn more money than your father. And fall in love with his landlady’s daughter. Who rejects your marriage proposal.

“The second most popular game—we played as children—is house.“—Green Velvet, Preacherman

Being denied to finally play your own adult version of “house”, you breakdown. develop an ‘unpleasant attitude’. Given that nobody taught you how to satisfy your own needs, or handle conflict yet—an feasible response.

Eventually, your cynicism creeps into your profession. Telling customers not to buy the “worthless art.” You get fired. And attend your questions to god. Whom else to ask??

When you don’t understand gods language, and his representatives misinterpret your actions

Resorting to your families’ ambitions, you now want to become not ‘just’ a preacher, but a minister. You study diligently for a year to enter the School of Theology in Amsterdam. Yet refuse to take the Latin exams. For deeming Latin to be “the dead language of poor people.” Entrance denied.

Eventually, you become a missionary in a working-class, coal-mining district of Belgium. Seeking dignity, as a mean of supporting for your congregation, you give up your comfy lodgings, and move to a small hut.

However, your humble living conditions defy the Church of Belgium’s definition of priesthood’s dignity. And are met with dismissal. Can’t do anything ‘right’, can you?

“One day you’ll return to the warmth of leaving home” —International Pony 🤎 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiBFbNgH8Po

“Yo, holmes to Bel-Air Etten”

You take your 25 years of irritating existence to the road, walk 75 kilometres to Brussel. Eventually gave into your parents pressure to return ‘home’. Where your irritation is met growing frustration. Up to the point where your father deems committing you to the nearby lunatic asylum a feasible option.

As a response to the ‘supportive’ atmosphere, you resort to lodging with a miner. Where you capture your growing interest in scenes in your own drawings.

Despite your experience-based aversion against formal schools of art, you follow your brothers recommendation. And register with the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts. To study the standard rules of modelling, perspective and human anatomy.

Meanwhile, your genetic call for playing ‘house’ got shattered by your lack of meeting societies’ standards. Maybe because of your uncanny persistence. Maybe because you weren’t able to sustain yourself.

At the same time, aspiring to live up to the artists’ status of another cousin of yours. Who introduces you to oil painting at the age of 29, and teaches you for two years. Before stopping to answer your letters.

Because you had fostered a ‘domestic arrangement’ with a formerly alcoholic prostitute. Being pressured by your father to abandon the relationship, the woman sinks back into prostitution.

To a decade of ‘creating’

Your love life remains nothing short of disastrous, albeit it inexistent. You focus on honing your craft, refine your stroke and palette. Your works become more and more vibrant in the way you manage to infuse the world’s beauty into them. The kind of beauty your own life is lacking.

You manage to only foster the relationship to your brother. Who keeps supporting you mentally as well as financially. Up to the point where he found you unbearable for a while, too.

Along the way, you move from city to city. A few of your works are being presented at exhibitions and galleries. You alienate fellow artists with your critical bickering. Somehow maintain an unbalanced, controlling and likewise deteriorating ‘friendship’ with an artist you admire.

Quick interlude—stick this in your head:

create (verb)2

UK old-fashioned: ‘’to show that you are angry‘’

Example: “If she sees you with an ice cream she’ll only start creating.”

To cut the story as short as you cut your ear

Your mental state erodes to the point of hearing voices. You’re being hospitalized after removing your ear with a razor. Following a petition by towspeople describing you as “redheaded madman”, your atelier is being closed.

At this point in time, value of your paintings are best estimated by this line from Wikipedia: “The physician was not fond of the painting and used it to repair a chicken coop, then gave it away.“”

Aged 36, you voluntarily enter an asylum. Where you occupy two cells with barred windows. One becomes your studio. The asylum’s garden and interior become subject of your paintings. You paint them with increasingly surrealistic, swirly strokes.

In the last January of your life, your work is praised as genius for the first time. Unfortunately, beyond the lapse of your sanity. You leave the mental clinic to move in with your brother. And receive treatment by a physician. Who you deem to be at ill as yourself, if not more.

In one of your last letters, you describe the ‘sadness and extreme loneliness’. And that your ‘canvases will tell others what you cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating you find the countryside’.

At the age of 37, you shoot yourself in your chest. And die thirty hours later in the company of your brother. According to whom your last words were:

“The sadness will last forever.”

It took you 27 years of your life to start painting for the sake of painting getting the sadness ‘off your chest’. In the single decade of your ‘productivity’, you created:

  • +800 oil paintings
  • +700 drawings
  • A documentation of your thought processes

In your lifetime, you sold one painting for 400 francs to a fellow artist. You lived at the brink of poverty. And only started gaining reputation when your sanity wasn’t able to fathom it.

Dear hypothetical Vincent (that’s you), please tell me:

What did you mean with your last words?

Resources

  1. Dutch naming traditions https://www.dutchgenealogy.nl/dutch-naming-traditions/ ↩

  2. UK old-fashioned: to create https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/create ↩