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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: Should reviewers have a Perfect, or at least Relative pitch? posted by Eldragon on December 10, 2014 at 08:17:25:
I read this on a blog not long ago written by Andrew Bolt. It moved me:Vincent van Gogh is 27. He has utterly failed at everything - as an art dealer, teacher, student, preacher, even suitor. He is living in utter poverty, with no job and no home, and is estranged from his parents, friends, mentors and relatives.
He does not know what next to do. He certainly does not know he will be an artist. Indeed, he has not completed a single serious painting in his life, and done not one competent drawing to reveal his talent. What’s more, he does not know he has just 10 years left to live.
At this point, he breaks a long silence with his beloved brother Theo by writing one of the saddest, bravest and most inspiring letters I have ever read.
He admits he is in despair:
How then could I then be of any use to anyone? And so I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were.
He knows exactly how far he’s fallen:
It is true that I have forfeited the trust of various people, it is true that my financial affairs are in a sorry state, it is true that the future looks rather bleak, it is true that I might have done better, it is true that I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living, it is true that my studies are in a fairly lamentable and appalling state, and that my needs are greater, infinitely greater than my resources. But does that mean going downhill and doing nothing?
He feels a misfit:
I am a man of passions, capable of and given to doing more or less outrageous things for which I sometimes feel a little sorry. Every so often I say or do something too hastily, when it would have been better to have shown a little more patience… Now, one of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do.But he knows there is within him a hunger to know, to understand, to impart, to do something great - but what?
And I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.
It simply cannot be that he had nothing to offer, no matter how often he has been told so:
...one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one’s spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says “How long, my God!”
Well, that’s how it is, can you tell what goes on within by looking at what happens without? There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney, and they walk on.
All right, then, what is to be done, should one tend that inward fire, turn to oneself for strength, wait patiently - yet with how much impatience! - wait, I say, for the moment when someone who wants to comes and sits down beside one’s fire and perhaps stays on? Let him who believes in God await the moment that will sooner or later arrive.
Well, right now it seems that things are going very badly for me, have been doing so for some considerable time, and may continue to do so well into the future. But it is possible that everything will get better after it has all seemed to go wrong. I am not counting on it, it may never happen, but if there should be a change for the better I should regard that as a gain, I should rejoice, I should say, at last! So there was something after all!
He’s called an idler, but he knows he is working furiously in his mind, reading, thinking.... He has a great purpose - if only he could find it!
Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.
Not long after this van Gogh decided to learn how to draw. His efforts at this time showed little of what was to come:A decade later van Gogh was dead. What glories he had done.
"You have to leave something to your imagination"
Edits: 12/14/14
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Follow Ups
- RE: Should reviewers have a Perfect, or at least Relative pitch? - Heifetz 09:08:18 12/14/14 (1)
- RE: Should reviewers have a Perfect, or at least Relative pitch? - bjh 13:33:56 12/14/14 (0)
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