Do whatcha do

This is why artists do crazy stuff like cut off their ear and ask a prostitute to hold it for safe keeping… Another excerpt from a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother:

“I still have not expressed it well. Tell Serret that I should be desperate if my figures were right, tell him I don’t know want them to be academically correct, tell him that I mean that when one photographs a digger, he would certainly not be digging. Tell him that I adore the figures of Michelangelo, even though the legs are rather too long- the hips and buttocks too wide. Tell him that that is why in my eyes Millet and Lhermitte are the true painters, because they paint things not as they are, traced in a dry analytical way, but as they, Millet, Lhermitte, Michelangelo, feel them.”*

Jean-Francois Millet, Woman with a Rake, 1856-7, oil on canvas

Jesus Lord, have you ever seen someone so desperate to express and defend themselves? His letters are just full of this sort of explaining! Creating art is this constant process of examining reality, translating it to a work, reviewing what has been done, considering the vision produced for and opinion of the viewer, revising- all while trying to be true to oneself! I consider how consuming I have felt artmaking to be- it takes over your mind, time, everything. First you start out to make sculpture and next thing you know you've updated your tetanus booster for the next 10 years, you haven’t slept more than 4 hours a night in the past week, all you’ve eaten is peanut butter and jelly on stale bread for the past 3 days, you’re covered in unidentifiable crud of various inorganic origins, your friends have long since given up on calling you, and not only are you now talking to yourself but suddenly you’ve started answering back as well. This is what it means to put all of your heart and talent into something. Something we could probably all stand to do a little more often.

*Ysseling, Hester. De brieven van Vincent van Gogh, The Hague: SDU Uitgeverij, 1990.
** Image source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art