Vincent Convinced Me Poem by Ananta Madhavan

He took to painting when he lost his job,
Partly because he had to make a living,
And partly because he loved to daub
Some ochre hue on canvas, board or wall
To contrast with the orange or the grey.


He could not sell his pictures in the mart
They held on Saturdays, but undeterred
He trusted his own way of seeing things,
Ploughmen, women washing clothes, workmen
Piling up sawn planks; or sitting before
A mirror, his visage, gaunt and bristly. Vincent
Van Gogh, twenty-two perhaps, a self-portrait
In sadness, madness, genius.


A fellow artist asked him what he saw
Differently from others
In the same cottages, horses, haystack and cows;
Who would want to buy such pictures with hard cash?


If only folk had known what treasures they lost
When their candid eyes revealed the obvious,
But blind to images of inner eye and
The bold brush strokes of a jobless genius.


Vincent knew that real artists paint things
Not as they are to camera lenses,
But as poets, painters and eccentrics may feel
What they perceive in life and art
With their own entreating mind and heart.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
3 February,2015.

Written on reading about a new biography of Van Gogh, by
Michael Kimmelman in the New York Review of Books,5 February,
2015