'When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin...'

Irving Stone | Bio-history

The Passionate Call of an Artist – Vincent van Gogh

Stone, Irving Stone - has his own sweet aura on him, that he puts forth so majestically, so gracefully, so elegantly and so seamlessly into his writings!

He is known especially for his biographical novels – almost a dozen of them!

Yes! Biographical novels!

Two among them – the Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy have become quite a sensation today, thanks also to their Hollywood film adaptations.

Interestingly, Stone calls his work ‘bio-history’, wherein he carefully selects a certain historical character, does some real, exhaustive research on the character, and then after emphatically and empathetically sliding into the shoes of his chosen character, he reconstructs all his informed lines on them - his biographical novels, after much painstaking probing into an array of diaries, journals, letters, etc.  

Lust for Life (1934), is a profound fictionalized account of the painter Vincent van Gogh – one of the greatest icons of art ever!

Added, Irving tells us that, Vincent van Gogh started learning the art of painting right from scratch, only when he was around 27 years old, and today he’s remembered as one of the best artists to have ever happened to the world of art!

Bespeaks greatly to the Tennysonian maxim –

‘tis not too late to seek a newer world, ain’t it?

Remembering Stone on his birthday today, me thought of reproducing just a few lovely paragraphs from his Lust for Life.

“Your canvases are cold, Cezanne,” he shouted. “Ice cold. It freezes me just to look at them. There’s not an ounce of emotion in all the miles of canvas you’ve flung paint at.”

“I don’t try to paint emotion,” retorted Cezanne. “I leave that to the novelists. I paint apples and landscapes.”

“You don’t paint emotion because you can’t. You paint with your eyes, that’s what you paint with.”

“What does anyone else paint with?”

“With all sorts of things.” Gauguin took a quick look about the room.

“Lautrec, there, paints with his spleen. Vincent paints with his heart. Seurat paints with his mind, which is almost as bad as painting with your eyes. And Rousseau paints with his imagination”.

When I paint a sun, I want to make people feel it revolving at a terrific rate of speed. Giving off light and heat waves of tremendous power.

When I paint a cornfield I want people to feel the atoms within the corn pushing out to their final growth and bursting.

When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin, the seeds at the core striving outward to their own fruition!

Woww! What great grandeur and what sweet awesomeness to these lines of Irving Stone!!!

The call of the artist clarioned so cute and so elegantly by a master-writer – Stone, Irving Stone!

Just one more, on Vincent’s love for books –

Summer thinned into fall. With the death of the meagre vegetation something came to life within Vincent.

He could not yet face his own life, so he turned to the lives of others. He returned to his books.

Reading had always been his finest and most constant pleasure, and now in the stories of other people’s triumphs and failures, sufferings and joys, he found surcease from the ever haunting spectre of his own fiasco.

When the weather permitted he went out into the fields and read for the entire day; when it rained he either lay on his bed under the eaves or leaned a chair against a wall in the Denis kitchen, and sat there for hours, engrossed.

With the passing of the weeks he absorbed the life stories of hundreds of ordinary people like himself, who strove, succeeded a little, and failed a great deal; and through them he slowly got a proper perspective on himself.

The theme that ran through his brain:

“I’m a failure. I’m a failure. I’m a failure,” gave way to “What shall I try now? What am I best fitted for? Where is my proper place in the world?”

In every book he read, he looked for that pursuit which might give his life direction again.

Words that breathe on their own with such an air or reality – with such a reality of representment – on them! Ain’t they dear reader?

Please do grab a copy of these two lovely books, and send me your little observations on the life of the legendary Vincent van Gogh [through the fictionalised lens of Irving Stone].

Happy happy reading to y’all!