Vincent Van Gogh was very much the artist's artist. He was a man who had great 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.
In many respects, my approach to Vincent as an individual mirrored how Van Gogh has been approached by cultures at large. When I encounter Vincent in art books, the writings showed tension, warmth, uneasyness, and appreciation. Likewise, when I encounter Vincent in music, it is on a level of emotional beauty. However, when I read about Van Gogh in psychology books, the writings showed sterility and coldness. After reading what Vincent wrote about himself, and looking at his self-portraits, I suspect he fluctuated between the two extremes as well. Sometimes he tried to liberate his emotions in all their glory, and sometimes he tried to restrain them. Just as Freud proposed, inside everyone is an eternal conflict between liberation and restraint, and for Vincent, that conflict was particularly strong.
To explore the varied methods of accessing Van Gogh, I used 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. When I applied the style to Van Gogh, I achieved the paradox that I was seeking. The flowing lines behind each self-portrait created a sense of liberated emotional intensity, but the geometric forms in the face restrained that intensity to create a feeling of someone on the edge of control. In this way, the paintings mirror how society at large has approached Vincent, and perhaps how he approached himself.
Meeting Van Gogh - 2009
Mr Van Gogh 梵高先生- a Chinese indie folk song by Li Zhi
Vincent (Starry Starry Night) - Don McLean
The Doctor and Vincent - In the museum
The Illness of Vincent van Gogh
Dietrich Blumer, M.D.
Am J Psychiatry 159:519-526, April 2002 American Psychiatric Association
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) had an eccentric personality and unstable moods, suffered from recurrent psychotic episodes during the last 2 years of his extraordinary life, and committed suicide at the age of 37. Despite limited evidence, well over 150 physicians have ventured a perplexing variety of diagnoses of his illness. Henri Gastaut, in a study of the artist’s life and medical history published in 1956, identified van Gogh’s major illness during the last 2 years of his life as temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthe in the presence of an early limbic lesion. In essence, Gastaut confirmed the diagnosis originally made by the French physicians who had treated van Gogh. However, van Gogh had earlier suffered two distinct episodes of reactive depression, and there are clearly bipolar aspects to his history. Both episodes of depression were followed by sustained periods of increasingly high energy and enthusiasm, first as an evangelist and then as an artist. The highlights of van Gogh’s life and letters are reviewed and discussed in an effort toward better understanding of the complexity of his illness.
