Someone said, “Some days I’m van Gogh’s starry nights, and other days I’m his suicide letter.“

What hollowness may feel inside may be harder to explain than the greatest dialogues of the history of mankind. It is significantly more perplexing than anything that Plato or Aristotle may have left behind. Indeed, one may understand politics, soul, and kingdoms that have lived and died. Still, when it comes to making sense of an encapsulating inner world in a constant co-existence with an external world that remains merciless in its malice beauty, it’s like the blood in one’s brain comes to a halt. Indeed it is not by salting wounds with agony and washing away one’s sorrow with bloodied rivers running down one’s wrists that we find what art lies in pain, because somedays we are van Gogh’s starry nights, somedays we are his suicide letter, and other days, we beg to be anything in between.

Sometimes sadness fails to do justice to what one feels, for one forgets how to feel. How do we know what art is in pain when the pain is nothing but an empty canvas? When blood is too watered down to be painted on and tears don’t fall anymore, how do we even reckon what colour is this grief?

How do I paint my sorrows red when numbness dulls down all the colours, even the bluest of all the paints and thus, some I am van Gogh’s starry night, some days I’m his suicide letter, and some I’m his blank canvas. And to an artist and his art, to a grieving woman and her pain, a canvas that has been empty too long and a heart that has been numb for what may seem like forever is nothing but a one-way ticket to an inexorable hellfire.

Art imitates life, and pain imitates art. Tears flow like a waterfall blood that runs down like rivers and a heart that aches like the burning fumes of pigments saturated with lead oxides and hydrocarbons. Indeed historians argue, was it toxic paints that poisoned Van Gogh or was it his unrelenting pain? who knows. For all we know, art imitates life and pain imitates art.

Author:- Varun Chettri