Artist statement

Due to the struggles of his life and the sheer genius of his work, Vincent van Gogh is very much the artist’s artist. When he depicted the world, there was so much optimism in his work. Via his use of colours, he was able to infuse a level of emotion into his landscapes that vastly exceeded anything that could be conveyed by a photo or realistic representation. However, when he made himself the subject, it was almost as though he was trying to constrain himself, work out who he was, or make himself belong to an image. In his self-portraits, the background changed, the clothes changed, the hair changed, but the man was always the same, and that man seemed to struggle against the emotion that was so liberally expressed in his landscape paintings. As an artist with a psychology degree, I was interested in him as a troubled individual well as the techniques he used as an artist.

I am not completely sure why I painted his face with geometric shapes. One explanation is that my painting is a form of impressionism. I felt that he was trying to constrain himself, and by using that geometry, I was providing that logical restraint that I felt he had been aiming for. A second explanation is that Vincent’s liberal use of emotion was confronting for me and I used geometry to deal with that confrontation. Psychologists are a paradoxical breed in that they use logical arguments to explain why their patients are behaving illogically. I’ve often wondered whether the application of logical theory is a defence mechanism, and perhaps I was doing something similar with my infusion of geometric restraint into Vincent’s style of emotional liberation.

Although I am not particularly clear about my motivations, I found painting Vincent to be a very gratifying experience. I felt that I was able to meet him in a very empathetic way because not only was I exploring his mind, I was also exploring my own.