Catch the Breeze and the Winter Chills

by Presence

Self-Portrait with a Grey Felt Hat, Paris, 1887 - Oil on Cardboard

Madness (both insanity and anger) is being able to think of nothing else.  It is the absence of creativity. 

Therefore, Van Gogh was bi-polar, if he was mad.

No one can create beautiful works of art in a state of madness.

Perhaps if he was mad, it was merely in-between paintings?

This leads to the idea that his paintings expressed such talent because each painting was a way to focus on something – which also might be why he painted some of  the same exact scenes over and over again.

At times he might have painted with the fear of losing his mind, and that fear is perhaps the greatest of all fears; his paintings were some of the greatest of all paintings to many enthusiasts…

But in a sense – of performing well out of an absolute necessity – he was not unique because we all have that capability – to lift a car off a person being crushed to death.

While he was painting, Vincent Van Gogh might have been able to do that at will; because Vincent Van Gogh’s fears, his mental illness was so great – because he was aware of it. And it was because he was aware of it that we can actually see it in his paintings…

But consider that The Starry Night is one of the few like it in Van Gogh’s portfolio. You can actually see in this painting the man’s mental state as he painted it.

The large brown figure to the left is a tree stump; likely Van Gogh was hallucinating as he painted this, given all his other paintings were more or less accurate to reality – still life’s, self-portraits…

One thing is certain – long before Vincent Van Gogh, people painted what they saw. Perhaps what separates Van Gogh’s paintings from the rest is that he painted his own consciousness, regardless of his mental state. He truly loved to paint. Truly. Starry Night becomes unique as it actually represents the face of his mind. It is so magnificent that this single painting can bring the viewer into Van Gogh’s very consciousness, that this single painting can represent, to some, his evolution over time in his short 37 years…