You cannot paint good-bye

“You cannot paint good-bye”

Perhaps that is the best way that the book "Lust for Life" is summed up, the lines coming just before Vincent Van Gogh shot himself…he shot himself because he had his say, because there was nothing else he could speak. And when you have nothing else left to say, when all your life you had fought to have your say, to follow your own heart, life becomes just a hollow shell, nothing more…..

His say, his speech was painting and it was something in which he had poured his life and heart, ever since he ‘found’ himself at the age of 26, when he ‘lost’ God…..

Vincent Van Gogh’s life is ready made stuff for books, movies and plays and he has been amply featured in all of them….his life is portrayed as the classical struggle that an artist wages against an indifferent and sometimes a violent world, a struggle against the privation that comes of loneliness, that comes of being made an outcast when he doesn't fit the mold that society sets out for him…..of all such stories of struggles of artists, surely, that of Vincent stands out, if not for its uniqueness but for its fame….

I do not pretend to understand art….they seldom speak to me….words do, words have always opened up universes for me and the vividness and the compassion with which Irving Stone has written this book could never have failed to move me…..Stone has gone to the heart of his subject and has brought out the essence of Vincent Van Gogh’s need for existence, his lust for life……

I suspect that I will never be able to look at a Van Gogh painting again without feeling a pang in my heart, without giving a little salute to the man who painted his life into his masterpieces….battling ostracization and blatant discouragement at every turn, battling grinding poverty in which when he had to make a choice between buying colours and paying models to eating a loaf of bread, always making the first choice, battling failed love affairs which shattered him and changed his course of life, battling not only criticism of his work but criticism of his ideals as well and in the end battling insanity and a case of self-mutilation (he cut of a part of his ear)…..and of course, battling the disappointment of not being able to sell a piece of work until the very end (even then, he sold only one major painting for a few hundred francs, the same is worth millions now)

In all this he painted and it was all that mattered….he painted honestly, without sentimentalizing, he painted things of the soil, people of the soil as he saw them…..he could have painted pretty portraits of society women to get easy money, he preferred not to, for to him honesty to his art and beliefs mattered, and in his art he wanted character and personality in his subjects and according to him, the ladies of society had neither…..he painted nature as he saw, letting nature come to his canvas rather than he trying to force nature into it….in all his paintings, he put in everything that he had of himself, letting the picture portray his emotions of the scene before him….

In between his battles for art, we get to know Vincent, the man – with his all-encompassing humanity and his big heart and his quick emotions and his simple needs and his almost unshakeable beliefs, a man always forthright with his views – rather making enemies than lie, his constant search for love that was in so many ways always denied to him, his fortitude to stick to his beliefs when it would have been easier to just let go….we see a man of unwavering vitality with a lot of weakness and vulnerability and a constant need for recognition, a constant need for honest praise and a man with a bundle of emotions.

We also see a man with lots of humour which never left him, humour which was sardonic but never sarcastic….a man whom adversity changed but never broke completely…..

The story starts with Vincent as a guy going up the ladder selling paintings in an art gallery with a bright future infront of him….it was the first spurning of a woman he fell in love with (the landlady’s daughter – Ursula) that changed the course of his life….he then turned to religion but lost God in the mines of Borinage but found what he was seeking – his art….and after that follows what might be termed as an epic struggle to establish himself as an artist not only to the world but also to himself….his journey of development as an artist moved from Hague to Paris to Aldsen and back to Paris again….in this journey we encounter heartbreaks, separations and sacrifices that almost seem fantastic….we meet the impressionists in Paris, at a time when Paris must have been the cultural and cosmopolitan capital of the western world with Vincent coming into the circle of Emile Zola, Paul Cezanne, Paul Ganguin, Georges Seurat and people who have become legends today and are considered luminaries in art (Zola in literature of course)…..

One feature that is usually not very known about Vincent’s life is the contribution of his younger brother, Theo Van Gogh….surely, without Theo, Vincent would not have painted a single picture and perhaps would have perished in the mines of Borinage….every enterprise needs money and in the case of art, it needs a lot of faith as well…without Theo’s constant faith and encouragement, Vincent would perhaps have given up…..when the whole world seemed poised against Vincent, Theo almost became his angel with him sending Vincent money to carry on, without saving any himself…..

Vincent’s end of what he wanted to say almost coincided with Theo losing his job at the art gallery where he had worked for 16 years but where the new management did not like his style of functioning (he was always trying to push new talented artists and not content to just recycling old ‘popular’ art)….with his wife and children as dependents, Vincent must have been feeling a burden (he never had an income) on his brother and may have been a reason for his suicide (along with his looming insanity and the extinguishing of the previous voracious passion for painting)….in the end, Theo followed his beloved brother a few weeks to the grave…..worldwide fame came to Vincent after his widowed sister-in-law painstakingly collected Vincent’s life works and kept on pushing them till eventually they were noticed and appreciated around the world…..

Perhaps it’s the curse of so many of the greatest people in our history that in their lifetime, they are spit upon and constantly pushed to the edge of our society’s fringes and only after their death, do we realize their labour of love……that is never as true as with Vincent Van Gogh….

Don MacLean knew exactly what he was singing when he song those last immortal words in that immortal song on Vincent, "Starry Starry Night" (one of his famous painting)…

"But I could have told you Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you".