Finding Vincent: Beginning

As usual, I've got a lot on my mind. Sometimes I wish I could clone myself.

While I go further into my own life path and stream, I realize that sometimes to find myself, I find others that are into that stream.

I've always loved Vincent Van Gogh. His frenetic brushstrokes I could akin to mine, the bold use of color, and the wildly imaginative perception of what regular things are. I too, can relate to his quests for love, acceptance, and kindness. I can also relate feeling like the odd one out with my artwork where everyone else is getting acceptance but yet feeling like something would be increasingly missing if you went the way they did. I don't even want to get into "BOLD and DIFFERENT" as it's an increasing marketing tagline and after a while that echoes emptily. I think he couldn't be anything else.

Mine isn't a tale of self-absorption or self-martydom and I'm not about to start with Van Gogh. I don't think he set out to be one. I think he tried his best and in the most honest way possible.

What I want to know is why he mesmerizes me so. I want to know why he's more brilliant to me than Gauguin who is just as intriguing. Maybe I find Vincent more "honest"? Maybe that's why I want to call him by his first name - almost affectionately as he's someone that I feel close to. I don't think about posthumus love, but I do feel something deep within that I really relate to him.

There are times I have thought briefly that I wished I was there with him. Someone who truly understood him other than his brother. I saw and understood how he went about his relationships - wanting to have more, that bond, only to be rejected partially as no one understood and were empathetic to his attempts (mostly clumsy).

I want to travel in your time, Vincent. I want to live as you have lived. I want to see what you see. I want to see through your eyes - not documentaries that film with a bland eye, but someone truly engaged.

One of these days, I will see YOU, Vincent. I will see you who you really are and somehow take that into my soul. Maybe it will make me understand or find something of which words currently fail me to express.

Perhaps I will see your counterpart Michelangelo, and to see that madness that we all suffer from in order to see how he thrived, and excelled.