As a five-year-old, I loved fairies, Spice Girls and Vincent van Gogh. It wasn’t the famous ear incident or the existential despair that I found fascinating, but a picture book. For the Love of Vincent, by Brenda V Northeast, told the story of Van Gogh’s life but with one minor change: Vincent was a teddy bear, not a depressed Dutchman. It was this book that lead me to the real Van Gogh and to his art, which was vibrant and alive and made complete sense to a small child who mainly painted with her fingers. I loved Vincent, man and bear; I even went as Vincent Van Bear to Book Week and confused the hell out of everyone.
I was a happy painter for years, until I reached high school and I started getting marked for it. When art went from something I simply did to something I could be judged for, that made it terrifying. And as I learned more about artists like Vincent (man, not bear), I began to suspect that an artist’s life was for other people, who seemed to experience life a lot more vibrantly than I did, good and bad. Taking solace in the fact that I would never have been exceptional made it easier to just stop.
