VAN GOGH: ARTIST AS VISIONARY ‘SEER’
One day in 1915, Sai Maharaj asked me to describe an important event I witnessed when I was in England. When I mentioned the name Vincent van Gogh and his art exhibition, Baba was happy and declared that Vincent van Gogh was a visionary ‘seer’. Sai Maharaj clarified that in everyday usage, the word ‘seer’ denotes a sage, a wise person, or a mystic. But the term also refers to one who sees, a visionary.
These two connotations of the word coalesced for me. Then, Baba asked me to read out the portion from my diary during my stay in London about my visit to an exhibition called ‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ which displayed reproductions of the works of the Dutch painter.
As the text accompanying the exhibits said, Vincent van Gogh is the ‘rock star’ of the Western art world, the Presley of painters. People who wouldn’t know Rembrandt from Rubens, a Husain from a Souza, instantly recognize Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ — the most replicated artwork in the world.
Born in 1853 in Holland, Van Gogh died at the age of 37 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 
During his all-too-short life, he created over 2,000 artworks, including 900 oil paintings and 1,100 sketches and illustrations. A clinical depressive who suffered from bipolar disorder, he seemed to work in a furious race against mortal time, often completing a new painting in less than 36 hours.
The London exhibition used digital technology and virtual reality to draw the viewers into it, to ‘immerse’ them in the world as seen by the artist. A real-life scene, of stars in a nightscape, of a town’s lights reflected on a dark river, of a flock of birds flying over a field of wheat, of a room furnished with a bed and a chair, were morphed into their transfiguration by the tormented genius of the artist, by how he saw these everyday things and how he painted them.
Stars in the night sky became vertiginous whirlpools of dazzling light, you could hear the wind sighing through the field of grain and the feathers of birds in flight, feel the texture of the rough cotton sheet of the bed, the crisscross weave of the seat of the chair as if you were sitting on it.
Reality, the reality of normative sensory experience, disappeared and was sublimated, into a more real ‘reality’ of a double vision, which simultaneously saw both the external world and the immensity of the world within the mind, the inner universe of the artist’s consciousness, and bound the two together in an alchemy of paint and canvas.
I was happy to note a personal experience of this great artist – “When I sleep, I dream of painting, and when I wake, I paint my dreams,” said Van Gogh.
And the dreams he painted were startlingly unique. Analyzing his use of paint, an oculist has suggested that he saw shades of color differently from others, and perhaps this imparted to his palette knife strokes the fierce energy which makes his paintings leap out of the canvas to stun the viewer with their intense vitality.
Van Gogh was a ‘seer’ who saw things differently, a prophet far ahead in his time, during which he sold just one work.
Shunned by a world blind to his vision, he became a messiah martyred on the crucifix of oblivion. But he left a life-changing testament for future generations, a gospel of radiant, inextinguishable light.
Sai Maharaj appreciated my efforts to record this memorable art exhibition in my diary.
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