Van Gogh - THE LUME Melbourne

[@JimNicholls]

A very novel concept that the artist himself would probably have appreciated. I'll look forward to seeing the visit by you (and your wife?) to the Singapore event.

[@CMChen]

Van Gogh's art wasn't appreciated till after his suicide. Many of his works were discarded or thrown away during his time. Now each of his paintings are worth at least a million dollars. I'll attached a write up in the next comment. Jim, that's my wife at THE LUME Melbourne with me. The Melbourne experience was excellent and hard to beat. I'll visit Singapore's version and see how good it is. I am posting this video on both my channels to see which channel has better response. At the moment, Walks channel has better response.

[@CMChen]

Forwarded interesting writeup on Van Gogh. "Vincent Van Gogh, one of the Dutch painters, could not sell a single painting in his whole life. Now only two hundred paintings have survived out of thousands that he painted, because nobody took care of them. He was simply distributing them to friends; nobody would purchase them. People were afraid even to hang his paintings in their sitting rooms because whoever would see them would think that they were crazy: what kind of painting are you hanging here? People were taking them - not to hurt him - thanking him, and throwing his paintings into their basements so nobody would see. Now each of his paintings is worth a million dollars. What happened in one hundred years? The man himself was forced into a mad asylum when he was only thirty-two. And he was forced because of his painting - he was not harmful, he was not violent, he was not doing anything to anybody. But anybody who looked at his paintings was absolutely certain that this man was mad and unreliable. He should be put in a madhouse. If he could paint these things, he might do anything….” For example, he always painted stars as spirals. Even other painters told him, “Stars are not spirals!” He said, “I also see the stars. I see that they are not spirals, but the moment I start painting them something in me says so strongly that they are spirals. The distance is so vast… that’s why your eyes cannot see exactly what their shape is. And the voice is so strong. I am simply unable to do anything else but what my inner being says to do.” And now physicists have discovered that stars are spirals. It has gone like a shock throughout the world of painters, that only one painter in the whole history of man had some inner contact and communication with the stars - and that was a man who was thought to be mad. And because he was thought to be mad, nobody was ready to give him any service. Every week, his brother used to give him enough money to last for seven days. And he was fasting three days in a week and eating four days - because that was the only way to purchase canvas and colors and brushes to paint. Painting was more important than life. He committed suicide at the age of thirty -three. Just after his release from the madhouse, he painted only one painting, which they had prevented him from painting in the madhouse. He wanted to paint the sun. It took him one year. He lost his eyes… the burning sun, the hot sun, and the whole day long he would be watching all the colors, from the morning till the evening, from the sunrise to the sunset. He wanted the painting to contain everything about the sun, the whole biography of the sun. Everybody who was sympathetic to him told him, “This is too much. Just studying it one day is enough; it is the same sun.” Van Gogh said, “You don’t know. It is never the same. You have never looked at it. I have never seen the same sunrise twice, never seen the same sunset again. And I want my painting to be a biography.” One year… the whole day watching the sun… He lost his eyes, but he painted. And when the painting was complete, he wrote a small letter to his brother: “I am not committing suicide out of any despair - because I am one of the most successful men in the world. I have done whatever I wanted to do in spite of the whole world condemning me. But this was my last wish, to paint the whole biography of the sun in one painting. It is completed today. I am immensely joyful, and now there is no need to live. I was living to paint; painting was my life, not breathing.” And he shot himself dead. You cannot categorize him with ordinary suicides. It is not a suicide - out of despair, out of sadness, out of failure - no. Out of immense success, out of total fulfillment, seeing that now, why unnecessarily go on living and waiting for death?… “I have done the work that I wanted to do.” Every creative artist has to understand this: the moment people start thinking about him that he is a little bit off center, that something is loose in his head, he should rejoice that he has crossed the boundary of the mundane and the mediocre. Now he has grown the wings which others don’t have."

[@JimNicholls]

@@CMChen Thank you for that. A great man, but unrecognised at the time.