Meeting Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was very much the artist's artist. He was a man of pure heart, and one with faith in the people around him, but also a man who was misunderstood and ignored in his lifetime. In Meeting Van Gogh,, I wanted to explore him both as an artist that could empathise with his story and also as a psychologist who that sterilised his story with psychological explanations of mental illness. In other words, the artist in me wanted to feel what Vincent felt, but the pseudo-psychologist in me wanted to restrain those emotions. After reading what Vincent wrote about himself, I suspect he felt the same way.

To explore the varied methods of accessing Van Gogh, I use a style I refer to as Geometric Expressionism. I’ve always been fascinated with the psychological power of shape. When I look at Picasso’s weeping women series, I feel emotion, but it is a kind of restrained intensity; almost like looking at a woman crying in an intellectual way. By constraining emotion, the geometry has a way of denying a cathrthic release, which can actually increase emotional tension. The flowing lines behind each self-portrait create a sense of liberated emotional intensity, but the geometric forms in the face restrain that intensity to create a feeling of someone on the edge of control.