VVG is universally loved. I recommend the Dafoe movie very highly.
Vincent was much like The Elephant man. Kids in Arles would rap on his window, at the little yellow house, and mock him. They’d throw cabbages at his on the streets. If you saw him approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to avoid passing him. he stank of filth, and was generally rude or weird to anyone who wasn’t a direct friend. if you were his friend, he was intelligent, witty and bizarre.
This is why I don’t buy into the Dr Who episode. He was not good company. And, that’s sad.
Auntie AnalogueMarch 10, 2020, 8:37 PM
Pass the potatoes!
tcMarch 10, 2020, 9:46 PM
We saw the Van Gogh exhibit at the London Tate last summer.
I could’ve spent all day there. Shame I didn’t.
rabbit tobaccoMarch 10, 2020, 9:51 PM
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears….
MMinLamesaMarch 11, 2020, 12:31 AM
His paintings are beautiful, I had the pleasure of standing in front of one once in Denver. Gorgeous texture.
However, being a life long glass artist(68) in my book the American artist, Louis Comfort Tiffany is responsible for the most goose bump producing art I’ve ever had the luxury to see. Did he personally craft 1,000s of leaded windows, shades and other priceless works of art? Of course not but he was at the Studio and Corona every day making sure the work produced was what he envisioned.
There was also this fellow in Italy who commanded several mediums, one of which was sculpture. I had the unforgettable experience at the age of 13 to ride a moving sidewalk in a dark room in front of the only illuminated object in that room. It was the Pieta and it blew my young mind.
I think calling any man “the greatest artist who ever lived” just ain’t right.
Nunnya Bidnez, jrMarch 11, 2020, 6:16 AM
I walk past Louis Comfort Tiffany’s gravesite frequently;
it is surprisingly plain and unadorned, and not in a prominent location.
One of the earliest battles of the American Revolution was fought on these grounds, nearly sixty-five years before the cemetery opened….
the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776.
BillHMarch 11, 2020, 7:44 AM
The first wall hanging we newlyweds hung in our furnished apartment in ’55 was a Sunflowers print, just like ‘leventy million other newlyweds did back then. Seemed like every neighbor and friend we visited had either that one or the blue one, Irises I think it was, hung on their LR wall. Lust for Life came out about that time and we dutifully plunked down our 50¢ each and watched it. Van Gogh was big in our mid-50s world.
CrisMarch 11, 2020, 10:54 AM
I highly recommend the movie ‘Loving Vincent’ – 95 minutes of oil-painted animation. Truly beautiful.
I quite agree Casey Klahn, but I gotta throw in a yea but;
Vincent may have been, OK, was, rude crude, strange and stank to high heaven but that Dr. Who scene comes very close to art surpassing life and TV being art. The staging, timing, camera angles and dialog, etc., were quite superb.
Also it allows me the conceit that just maybe one of my paintings that I’ve traded for beer in a bar might, someday, actually move someone! -grin-
I think that was the sweetest episode of the Doctor.
When you walk into the modern/impressionist section of the Getty in L.A., his Irises pops out and grabs your eye before anything else in the room.
Casey KlahnMarch 11, 2020, 2:03 PM
Hi, James ONeil. Very happy for the discussion. My teenage daughter is a big VVG fan, and her defense is that the DW scene imagines him being honored by his exhibition, and so why not extend the fantasy? For my part, I just want those interested to know the extent of his mental plight and, anyway, I never do well with “crazy person as hero” movies because…fucking crazy people are essentially doing time in hell. It ain’t glamorous (my mother was one such person).
BTW, M. van Gogh is my number three fave artist of all time. I encourage any and all media about him. I had to put down the Smith Naifeh biography of him. Too gay. The oil painting movie I liked but didn’t love. The movies that did well were Lust for Life and At Eternity’s Gate.
A fantastic book is 9 Weeks in Arles. How many steps there were between the adjacent cafe and the yellow house (of his bedroom fame). Hpw close was the whore house where he delivered his ear? What did he eat for breakfast? All of this, but not a dull moment ever. Martin Gayford.
Quite agree Casey, your fave artists choice. I often play with the 3 most underappreciated 20th century artists, who, decades later, will be considered game changers. I’ll mention Rockwell, Dali and Bob Ross as such & it always leads to interesting discussions, & no, I never defend my choices, just let the conversation revolve around them.
Crazy folks; no, not as heroes but as just folks tryin’ to get through the day, like the rest of us. Give then a hand when you can, move back at arm’s length when necessary and never ever throw cabbages at them.
I’m curious, Casey. You said you put down the Smith/Naifeh biography because it was too “gay’? I’ve got the book nearby on a shelf. Have been meaning to get to it for a few years, and I will. The authors are gay… or were. One of them died. I can’t recall whom. What turned you off about the book? I visit goodreads to get a gist of public reaction before I crack a tome, but you being a painter I’d like to know what you thought about the book… and your perception of Vincent that didn’t jive with what you were reading.
I thought this article from a few years back was pretty cool. A search was launched to find the most Vincent-looking man alive. This effort resulted with Daniel Baker of Christchurch, England stepping forward. https://iamvincent.com
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandburg
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
ARTIST: CASEY KLAHN
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
Ferreya
Song of Myself
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
![The Olympic Peninsula at the Vernal Equinox [2014]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/a_olympicpen.jpg "The Olympic Peninsula at the Vernal Equinox [2014]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
VVG is universally loved. I recommend the Dafoe movie very highly.
Vincent was much like The Elephant man. Kids in Arles would rap on his window, at the little yellow house, and mock him. They’d throw cabbages at his on the streets. If you saw him approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to avoid passing him. he stank of filth, and was generally rude or weird to anyone who wasn’t a direct friend. if you were his friend, he was intelligent, witty and bizarre.
This is why I don’t buy into the Dr Who episode. He was not good company. And, that’s sad.
Pass the potatoes!
We saw the Van Gogh exhibit at the London Tate last summer.
I could’ve spent all day there. Shame I didn’t.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears….
His paintings are beautiful, I had the pleasure of standing in front of one once in Denver. Gorgeous texture.
However, being a life long glass artist(68) in my book the American artist, Louis Comfort Tiffany is responsible for the most goose bump producing art I’ve ever had the luxury to see. Did he personally craft 1,000s of leaded windows, shades and other priceless works of art? Of course not but he was at the Studio and Corona every day making sure the work produced was what he envisioned.
There was also this fellow in Italy who commanded several mediums, one of which was sculpture. I had the unforgettable experience at the age of 13 to ride a moving sidewalk in a dark room in front of the only illuminated object in that room. It was the Pieta and it blew my young mind.
I think calling any man “the greatest artist who ever lived” just ain’t right.
I walk past Louis Comfort Tiffany’s gravesite frequently;
it is surprisingly plain and unadorned, and not in a prominent location.
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2018/311/2957_fc2d6778-f76f-4019-ab06-1fa1a5714adc.jpeg
He designed many other grave markers in the same cemetery which are what you would have expected his own to look like.
https://www.green-wood.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/tiffany.chapman.alfred.jpg
One of the earliest battles of the American Revolution was fought on these grounds, nearly sixty-five years before the cemetery opened….
the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776.
The first wall hanging we newlyweds hung in our furnished apartment in ’55 was a Sunflowers print, just like ‘leventy million other newlyweds did back then. Seemed like every neighbor and friend we visited had either that one or the blue one, Irises I think it was, hung on their LR wall. Lust for Life came out about that time and we dutifully plunked down our 50¢ each and watched it. Van Gogh was big in our mid-50s world.
I highly recommend the movie ‘Loving Vincent’ – 95 minutes of oil-painted animation. Truly beautiful.
That was well done!
I quite agree Casey Klahn, but I gotta throw in a yea but;
Vincent may have been, OK, was, rude crude, strange and stank to high heaven but that Dr. Who scene comes very close to art surpassing life and TV being art. The staging, timing, camera angles and dialog, etc., were quite superb.
Also it allows me the conceit that just maybe one of my paintings that I’ve traded for beer in a bar might, someday, actually move someone! -grin-
I think that was the sweetest episode of the Doctor.
When you walk into the modern/impressionist section of the Getty in L.A., his Irises pops out and grabs your eye before anything else in the room.
Hi, James ONeil. Very happy for the discussion. My teenage daughter is a big VVG fan, and her defense is that the DW scene imagines him being honored by his exhibition, and so why not extend the fantasy? For my part, I just want those interested to know the extent of his mental plight and, anyway, I never do well with “crazy person as hero” movies because…fucking crazy people are essentially doing time in hell. It ain’t glamorous (my mother was one such person).
BTW, M. van Gogh is my number three fave artist of all time. I encourage any and all media about him. I had to put down the Smith Naifeh biography of him. Too gay. The oil painting movie I liked but didn’t love. The movies that did well were Lust for Life and At Eternity’s Gate.
A fantastic book is 9 Weeks in Arles. How many steps there were between the adjacent cafe and the yellow house (of his bedroom fame). Hpw close was the whore house where he delivered his ear? What did he eat for breakfast? All of this, but not a dull moment ever. Martin Gayford.
Quite agree Casey, your fave artists choice. I often play with the 3 most underappreciated 20th century artists, who, decades later, will be considered game changers. I’ll mention Rockwell, Dali and Bob Ross as such & it always leads to interesting discussions, & no, I never defend my choices, just let the conversation revolve around them.
Crazy folks; no, not as heroes but as just folks tryin’ to get through the day, like the rest of us. Give then a hand when you can, move back at arm’s length when necessary and never ever throw cabbages at them.
I’m curious, Casey. You said you put down the Smith/Naifeh biography because it was too “gay’? I’ve got the book nearby on a shelf. Have been meaning to get to it for a few years, and I will. The authors are gay… or were. One of them died. I can’t recall whom. What turned you off about the book? I visit goodreads to get a gist of public reaction before I crack a tome, but you being a painter I’d like to know what you thought about the book… and your perception of Vincent that didn’t jive with what you were reading.
I thought this article from a few years back was pretty cool. A search was launched to find the most Vincent-looking man alive. This effort resulted with Daniel Baker of Christchurch, England stepping forward. https://iamvincent.com