Van Gogh: the Mistral vs. mental illness

     I grow wary of the ways some of us reduce others and their achievements by a formula or a statement or two. After studying psychology for years, I believed I knew what motivated people, or how to discover what did. I was wrong. Yet even museum directors yield to such. On 4/20/2012, I visited the Van Gogh Up Close exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and dutifully listened to the recording provided, which frequently urged viewers to notice signs of mental illness in the paintings. For example, the diagonal brushstrokes that create movement in Van Gogh’s paintings are often attributed to anxiety. In fact, Arles, where many were painted, is so windy they have a name for the wind, Mistral, whose strength produces the area's luminous sunshine. Yet nowhere have I heard or read that the shifting quality of Van Gogh’s landscapes could be a portrayal of what he saw. Van Gogh was mentally ill, and both art critics and psychiatrists have failed to consider that he may also have been a careful planner and a craftsman. Art is attributed to impulse, emotion, anxiety, trauma, rather than to skill, effort or intention. To see how careful Van Gogh and all the impressionists and post-impressionists were in crafting their art, I had to view the paintings from several distances, and especially from across the gallery. Once I saw how the "impressionist" and abstract organized itself into near photographic representation from a distance, I realized every brush stroke was the result of craft and planning.