Vincent, Madness, and Me

Posted on August 21, 2007 in Biography Bipolar Disorder

[[Vincent Van Gogh|Vincent’s]] bipolar may have had nothing to do with his genius as an artist or at least that is what the editor of his letters to [[Emile Bernard]] believes. Van Gogh’s first major episode occurred in the form of a blowup against Paul Gaughin.

“It was the first deep crisis he got into,” Mr. [Leo] Jansen said. “It became clear that he was really a mental patient, and he knew that this would affect his abilities as an artist,” he continued. “Making art the way he did cost a lot of both physical and intellectual effort, and he felt he wouldn’t be able to work as well as he did before.”

From my own experience, I suggest that Van Gogh was [[hypomanic]] all along. But I decry the suggestion that his evocative whorls were the product of hallucination as the Van-Gogh-as-mad theory appears to posit. The groundwork for Van Gogh had already been done by the English painter [[J._M._W._Turner|Turner]]. [[Whistler]] was turning out similar products across the channel. Van Gogh began from where Turner left off and worked his paint brush in new, studied ways. Hypomania fed him as he ventured where no artist had gone before.

Jansen may be looking for the classic “laymen’s” signs of bipolar disorder — incoherence, inability to be creative. These are a myth. What I do relate to in Van Gogh’s experience is the feeling that a point can be reached where creativity is no longer possible, which is what happened after Vincent had his row with [[Paul Gaughin|Gaughin]]. Approximately a year ago, I had a serious fall, a breakthrough depression that left me doing nothing more than lying on the bed with my clothes on, listening to music. To help myself, I vowed that I would not give up either my writing or my photography. Since that promise, however, I have been dissatisfied with both. There’s a blockiness to my thought that leads me to devalue what I have written. My photos, for the most part, haven’t been as provocative. I feel a dull wedge driven into my brain and, though it gradually fades, I have my doubts that I will ever recover what I had.

[tags]bipolar disorder, bipolar, mania, depression, Vincent Van Gogh, Van Gogh, art, art and madness, biography[/tags]