The Impasto Master—my homage to Vincent

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was born this day in 1853.

Here’s a repost from several years ago.

Vincent van Gogh’s life as a tortured artist has become a cliche while his art continues to sell at auction for many millions of dollars.

But the living Vincent was far from a cliche; he was a breathing, feeling, and astute person; he was lucid when he painted his remarkable canvases, and when he wrote his many letters, which provide us with an unusual opportunity as voyeurs to see inside his soul.

Here’s a wonderful website that offers Vincent’s letters, and you can search by topic as well.

http://webexhibits.org/vangogh

His letters to his brother Theo are a narrative of his life as an artist who was not attached to the confines of impressionism, the modern art of his era. 

As Robert Henri writes in his book, The Art Spirit:

“Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

And what of understanding? What does it mean? Can you define its universal thread for yourself?

Whatever you do in life, the overarching goal is understanding. And understanding comes about through direct firsthand experience. Reading about it won’t do. No secondhand resource will. If you feel I might be overstating the case, I’m not. 

The premise:

Visitors to this website and readers of my book, An Artist Empowered, have already come across one of my mantras: no thing is obvious and no thing goes without saying.

On the radio this morning, I heard a writer, The New York Times replacement for the language column made famous by the late William Safire, talk about his newfound plum of a job.

Within the first minute, the writer uttered ‘obvious’, and then again within the next minute. I had no choice but to leave that radio interview to its own devices.

If obvious, meaning clear to everyone, had any significance, the world would be what the Buddha had envisioned—a place set free from mindless rote, ignorance, and superstition. 

Words, which developed after art, can enlighten and encourage, or they can cause havoc and mayhem. So, the next time ‘obvious’ dribbles near your tongue, say, for example, ‘apparent’ or ‘self-evident’ instead. Words that have depth and meaning empower you, and those around you.

Be diligent. You won’t be sorry. 

German American physicist Albert Einstein was born this day in 1879.

In his book, Einstein, Picasso, Arthur I. Miller writes:

“The corpus of Einstein’s fourth paper entitled ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,’ the so-called relativity paper, is at first glance no different from other scientific papers of that era.

“Yet first glance deceives: It was daring in both style and content. Today no leading physics journal would publish it because of its complete lack of citations to the literature.”

If this is so, then art and physics are allies in the description of truths: physical and metaphysical. Nearly a century after Einstein drew his line of chalk in the fabric of space-time, the quest for the Theory of Everything has become the holy grail of advanced theoretical physics.

The equation of the millennium would explain the elemental relationship of matter and energy, gravity and light.

We can also note that a considerable aspect of Einstein’s genius lay in his gift for asking the right questions coupled with his dedication, his ability to stay with a problem for many years until a solution revealed itself. 

Who is the arbiter of your thoughts, your feelings?

Before you answer, remember that we all are prisoners of the culture and language that we inherit. The artist, recognizing this limitation, creates a new universal language that is free from the bias and restrictions of the past.

Original thinking or feeling is based on nothing that preceded it. This is an essential insight to grasp for your own evolution.

Original means something unencumbered by what preceded it; original is not a conclusion, but a revelation that takes off in a new direction.

In the same way that you can’t plan an original thought, you can’t contrive original art. This isn’t an opinion; it is a universal constant.