I am fortunate to have had some diverse exposure to Vincent Van Gogh's painting. He has often been in the collections and exhibits that I choose to look at. His work is also propogated in many forms, and most recently I found a number of quotes with a painting matching the background and font colour that is part of a complementary pairing that I enjoy seeing repeated in so many of his works.
Today, I watched a film, hand painted by a hundred painters, that brought his death to life. It was at time's childish in precision, but powerful in its execution of drawing me in to places and paintings I had seen. There are characters brought to life from his portraits. There are places you walk into. There are rooms you already know, and others that you believe you have seen before. And then there are the fields of gold, and the starry night, with their vibrant colours and believable movement, now animated, as if they were meant to be all along.
I hadn't realized how late Vincent had come to painting, and how short his prolific career was. Starting at 28, he had 9 years to paint 900 paintings. He wrote daily letters to his brother Theo, who died of tertiary syphilis within months of Vincent's death, that was argued as an accidental death brilliantly, even though it has been largely accepted, with his own confession, of self-harm, and the septic death that was typical post trauma in the era before antibiotics.
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