A decade. That's how long Vincent van Gogh was a painter. His best work was created in a manic rush during the last years of his life. Did he know he was painting against the clock? Is that why he poured his soul onto the canvases? Is that what made life burn inside him?
I found van Gogh very early in life. I suspect many of us do. As a teenager, I collected books filled with his art, cried over his letters to his younger brother, Theo, read biographies about him, and fell in love with the Vincente Minnelli biopic, Lust for Life, though I can't vouch for its accuracy, having seen it so long ago.
Vincent is more than a painter, more than himself. We look into his haunted eyes, and we see our own rejected selves. We imagine him in his room in Arles or Saint-Rémy, furiously painting as a way to stave off his madness and find salvation in a world that could not recognize his genius. Perhaps we also feel invisible, thrown away, misunderstood.
He died at 37 without knowing his influence or importance. In a few months, I myself turn 37. Since my mother's death, I've felt a dreadful sense that my life is over, that I have lost everything, that I have failed in every conceivable way. I know too much of endings. In my youth, trauma robbed me of the right to blossom, to become.
But Vincent reminds me that we don't know what could be waiting. He came to painting in his late 20s, after a short-lived period as a pastor and missionary. He lived for almost three decades before truly picking up a paintbrush and expressing the beauty of his soul. Painting didn't save him, but it granted him immortality. It allowed him to reach us. We can look in his eyes and know that we are not alone in our loneliness.
What could be waiting inside me, not yet expressed or even found? Is my chance to blossom, to become, really over? Or is there still time, still the possibility for a life that is my own? Who could be out there, waiting to love me? It only takes one person to change everything. What good things could happen to me? My trauma is not all I am. Just because the first 36 years of my life have been agonizing doesn't mean the time left has to be. Maybe this is the beginning of something.
My god, I want to live! Even though my mother and father are gone. Even though I feel so rejected and alone. Even though I am talking to a void on the podcast and on this blog. Even though I am overlooked and unimportant and insignificant. I still want to be here. I want to love and feel and share and connect and laugh and create. Give all of life to me. I am greedy for it precisely because I've witnessed so much death. That's why my desire is uncontrollable, insatiable.
Van Gogh's art is full of life, despite how much pain he endured. His work is ubiquitous now—slapped on notebooks, tote bags, and coffee mugs—but still retains its freshness and extraordinary intensity. I love his vineyards, orchards, gardens, and wheatfields. Cascades of gold, swirls of purple. Cypress trees twisting and reaching for the cosmos. To see the world through Vincent's eyes is an honor.
