Starving artists - Painting on empty...
• Food is a common theme in art – from paintings of the last supper to Andy Warhol's soup cans.
• But just because you're painting food doesn’t mean you're eating it.
• The artists at the Joburg art fair are not going to like me for this but if you buy a piece of their art you may be inhibiting their creativity.
• A lot of the best art seems to have come about when the artists were hungry or eating rotten grain...
EXAMPLE 1: BOSCH AND THE GRAIN ROT MADNESS
• Sometimes eating poor quality ingredients is just as creatively stimulating as starving.
• What was Hieronymus Bosch thinking? He painted weird scenes full of visions of sin and human folly between 1475 and 1516. There are scary half human half vegetable figures, eggs belching smoke and fire.
• Art historians now think that the painter may have been suffering from (or at the very least recording the descriptions of others suffering from) a disease called St. Anthony's Fire (also known as Ergotism).
• It comes from consuming a fungus that is found on rye. When baked in bread this fungus forms LSD hence the hallucinations. Interestingly the Salem witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts, a century later occurred during an outbreak of rye ergot.
EXAMPLE 2: FAMISHED VAN GOGH - licking lead paint is not good for you (or your ears)
• All anyone ever remembers about Van Gogh was that he was the one who cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute. Incidentally he delivered it wrapped in a restaurant napkin.
• Van Gogh (who killed himself in 1890) was chronically broke and always hungry. He writes endless letters to his brother Theo in which he catalogs his hunger and misery.
• Reading van Gogh’s letters reveals that he suffered from dizziness resulting from hunger and excessive intake of caffeine and absinthe combined. Van Gogh consumed vast amounts of coffee. At one point, he wrote that he’d had only a few crusts of dry bread and 23 cups of coffee over a four day period.
• Independent of the poverty he had some funny eating habits - which may well have contributed to his madness. He consumed considerable quantities of lead based paint as he thought that licking his brushes helped the quality of his brush strokes.
EXAMPLE 3: MIRO’S MUNCHIES (or the lack their of)
• Surrealist Miro said that it was starvation that induced the visions that he recorded in dream paintings such as The Birth of the World (1925), which depicts a cosmic level of existence in which spermatozoic forms float in a primordial soup.
• When he arrived in Paris from Catalonia in the 1920s, Miro could barely afford to eat. He wrote of that time: "I was living on a few dried figs a day. I was too proud to ask my colleagues for help. Hunger was a great source of hallucinations. I would sit for long periods looking at the bare walls of my studio trying to capture these shapes on paper or burlap."
EXAMPLE 4: GREEDY GAUGUIN - the one that got lucky
• Paul Gauguin was hungry.
• The painter and sculptor arrived on the South Pacific island of Tahiti in April 1891, sailing from France on a government mission to document the life and customs of the French colony.
• He was very disappointed to find the capital, Papeete, Westernised and seedy, so he set out into the forest and pitched camp where he was much happier.
• There was just one problem- lack of food.
• He kept a diary in which he writes "Two days later I had run out of stores. I had thought that by paying I would be able to get all the food I required. Food was certainly to be found on the trees, in the mountains, in the sea, but one had to be able to climb the tall trees, go into the mountains and come back laden with heavy loads, know how to catch fish, to dive deep into the sea and wrench off the molluscs clinging to the rocks ... as I sadly considered my situation and my empty stomach, a native made signs and called out in the vernacular: 'Come and eat'."
• It was his first encounter with the generosity of the Tahitians. Gauguin's 1891 painting The Meal, or Bananas, now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris is a record of this event.
Moral of the story:
• Perhaps we should all make like the Tahitians and take a starving artist to lunch or at least buy a painting...
• Certainly we should refuse to accept severed ears wrapped in restaurant napkins.
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