I've been invited to a costume party to celebrate the coming of Spring. Invitees have been asked to come as something that relates to the month of March, either a famous person born during that month, a holiday celebrated during the month, or even an event that might have occurred in history during March. The invitation contained a quote from an Emily Dickinson poem:
"A little Madness in the Spring
is wholesome even for the King."
And with that first sentence I decided what to be for the party. While there are a great many really cool people or things that I could go as, I've decided to go as someone with a much more tenuous connection with the springtime (even though he was born in March): Vincent Van Gogh. I've decided that I am going to be Vincent during that last spring of his life, in Auvers, before he shot himself in the fields just a few short months later in July of 1890.
I admit that I am playing rather fast and loose with my own version of Van Gogh as I have transposed many of the events of his life to make my personal "party Vincent" more recognizable and palatable to be around than the real Vincent was. He was not always a nice person to be with, be it his mercurial moods and often angry personality or his questionable personal hygiene. I have chosen as my costume a rumpled blue suit with a dark vest, a felt hat and a pipe, which is what Vincent so proudly wore when he first moved to Paris to study art in 1886. As a general rule he wore workman's blues and was not especially into bathing or brushing his teeth, thus my choice of his attire upon his move to Paris, when he at least attempted to become somewhat careful of his hygiene (however temporary it might have been) and personal appearance. He was prone to wiping his brushes on his sleeve, so I may do some brush cleaning myself on my suit just to make it that much more authentic. I also am going to have only one ear (obviously not literally, although I'm a stickler for detail, even I have to balk at that). Even though Vincent cut his ear off on Christmas Eve 1888 in Arles, without the bloody white bandage around my head, I'll just be an unkempt man with a red beard mingling amongst the guests and no one would have a clue who I'm supposed to be. David has a man who designs special effects working for him and he has hired him to make me two right ears of latex painted to look realistically like the ear of a madman who has just cut it off during an episode of mania. How cool is that? I decided on two ears so that after I give one to my host and hostess who will both be stand-ins that night for the prostitute named Rachel (the lucky recipient of Vincent's gift) I will still have one ear left as a memento of the evening to tuck away with my costume.
I can't wait to go to the party and I am terribly excited about being Vincent for an evening (hopefully without the hysteria, violence and profound depression). If there was an artist that I would have loved to have met, it would have been him. What an amazing genius, what an amazing talent. His tortured soul may have made for an unbelievably difficult life, but that same madness is what fueled a catalogue of truly exquisite artwork.
