I Tried Van Gogh's Intense Daily Routine – ep. 8

Tortured geniuses. Why are we so fascinated by them? Maybe because all of us are secretly curious about how we can escape the mundanity of our lives and be special. Van Gogh was undeniably a special artist. Despite the fact that he died nearly 133 years ago, the world is still absolutely mesmerized by his work. I do not think for a second that living the daily routine of a genius from the 19th century will actually help me to understand him. If it were that easy, then perhaps the mystery of this man wouldn't be so enduring, and yet here we are. But I still think there is much that can be learned from people like this, who have touched humanity with their work. What is done in love is well done. And with that, let's enter the life of Vincent Van Gogh. I am headed to the French town Arles, where Vincent lived for roughly 15 months before getting admitted into a mental hospital, after the locals signed a petition to get him evicted. He had the nickname Lefour, the redhead madman, for his increasingly erratic behavior. Arriving in Arles, I was taken by the charm of this ancient Roman town. My first thought was, it is going to be difficult not to romanticize Van Gogh's time here. The artist moved south in search of a different kind of light, something warmer and brighter than what Paris could offer where he had previously lived, particularly in winter. Arriving here, I could immediately see why yellow was such a prominent color in his paintings. Visually, Arla is a little bit like being greeted with a warm hug. I cannot believe that I am doing this. This is kind of crazy. This is gonna crazy. Let's get started, shall we? Here's what I was able to find on his daily life. Although, yet again, in this series on living like the Giants, I have to give credit to the wonderful book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry for insights into Van Gogh's routine. Although this time around there's only one single paragraph on how Van Gogh lived his life. Today again from seven o'clock in the morning until six in the evening I worked without stirring except to take some food a step or two away. Van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to his brother Theo adding I have no thoughts of fatigue I shall do another picture this very night and I shall bring it off. This seemed to have been typical for the artist when in the grip of creative inspiration Van Gogh painted non-stop in a dumb fury of work barely pausing to eat and when his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin came to visit a few months later. Van Gogh's habits scarcely changed. He wrote to Theo, our days pass working, working all the time. In the evening we are deadbeat and we go off to the cafe. And after that, early to bed. Such is our life. Okay, thank goodness Van Gogh drank coffee. I don't know what I would do without it. So I don't have a whole lot of experience painting outside and by that I mean zero. If anything, I'm more similar to Gauguin's kind of approach to painting, which was slower and methodical, but I want to take inspiration. Not so much imitate, but inspiration from Van Gogh's very enthusiastic, fast-moving approach. I have this wonderful view of the rooftops, so I think I'm going to start with that and see how that goes. Uncharted territory. This is kind of fun. Excuse to paint more. I am really trying to take this as an opportunity to loosen up in terms of my style. Van Gogh's famous for applying thick paint onto the canvas. There's actually named for this it's called impasto from the Italian word for paste or mixture. Painting for me in many ways is about capturing emotion so it's not really that important for me to get all the details right so I'm trying to embody that as I do this. I've done a first layer of paint so I'm gonna keep applying over and over again to start to get some of the details here. I want to work on the rooftops because I feel like the rooftops the color of the rooftops is very important feels like a particularly unique look the south of France right and I really want to capture the right colors to represent that one of the most incredible things about Van Gogh is that he didn't start painting until he was 27 years old which is literally older than I am now as I'm making this also he never received any formal training so I am now going to get some bread and maybe start another painting Van Gogh's relationship with food was quite complicated this is dinner tonight when he was a preacher in Belgium prior to his painting career he supposedly ate mainly just dry bread some chestnuts and some potatoes having had his Protestant upbringing he equated virtue with abstinence from luxury and he felt that the working class was more honest he kind of looked down upon high society I'm lucky to be in the country with arguably the best bread in the world and I mean that as no disrespect to the Germans and Austrians out there. Cheers. There are some contradictions here, or some difficult nuance to navigate, I should say, because it was his brother who supported him through all of his work. He didn't earn his own bread, if you will. You know, Van Gogh is famous for having only sold one painting while he was alive, and it was for 400 francs, the equivalent of about $2,000 today. It's easy to romanticize his life, but that's really not a lot of money. And the painting that he sold was the Red Vineyard, one of his many works from his time in Arles. It is 3 p.m. I think. So it's been like eight hours. Wow, time is flying by though. I'm really, really enjoying this. I'm like getting into a flow state. My first painting is nearly done. I'm calling it Les Trois d'Arles, the rooftops of Arles. That's the view, this is what I was painting. Pretty decent, I'm actually pretty happy with how this came out, all things considered. Despite only working for 10 years, the age of 27 when he began until his death at 37, Van Gogh produced more than 900 paintings and many more drawings and sketches. The math on this is incredible. He completed a new piece of artwork almost every 36 hours. He was actually in a psychiatric hospital where Van Gogh created some of his most well-known works. So I was walking around Arles yesterday I came across this red door and I was drawn to come back here and I think I'm going to take a nice photo of it and paint it. This feels bizarre to do or to say but it's what I'm doing so. I don't know there's something really beautiful about this door and this wall and this spot. In a sense what draws me to Van Gogh's work was his unique way of seeing the world. You could see what other people quite literally couldn't see and I take that as inspiration to look more closely at the beauty of the world around me and capture it and to share my own unique way of saying things. At night I'll be drinking absinthe as this was supposedly Van Gogh's preferred to drink. He was an excessive drinker and struggled to reduce his consumption. This is only the second time I've ever had absinthe in my life. Okay yeah that's strong. Absinthe was actually banned in France in 1915, 25 years after Van Gogh's passing. When the wormwood used to make it was thought to cause hallucinations and madness. It was only in 2011, nearly a century later, that the ban was lifted in France, which is why I am able to drink it now. This morning light is incredible. Wow. This morning I'm going to finish what I could not finish yesterday because the lighting changed too quickly. The struggles of painting outside and I've got it pretty good. I'm still comfortable at home. I don't know how he did this out in nature. That's that's tough. Before we go any further I want to thank the sponsor of this video which is Audible and they've been longtime sponsors of this channel. I'm very grateful to have their support. It's making this video possible which allows me to go days on end doing nothing but painting essentially and it also means that I have a diet of potatoes and bread just for educational purposes, not out of necessity. Audible has an enormous library of audiobooks, podcasts. They're my go-to. I have over a hundred titles in my own personal library. Books have a life-changing quality to them, right? And there are so many audiobooks that I've listened to that have completely changed my perspective on things. Many of you asked me for book recommendations, and so I've actually gone ahead and made a custom listening list of a few audiobooks that I particularly enjoyed listening to recently. I picked them around the theme of learning how to operate in the 21st century. It feels like it has never been more important to equip ourselves with the right knowledge and skills, like emotional intelligence, to navigate life. Each of these audiobooks have had an impact on how I view work, rest, and relationships in the face of all the change happening around us. If you're interested, I'll actually be doing an Instagram Live book club around these titles in August. So I'll leave a link to my profile on Instagram down below if you wanna join for that. I think it'll be fun. And you can join Audible for a 30-day free trial using the link in the description. Audible, for me, is so worth it, it's not even funny. Thank you, Audible, for sponsoring this video. Van Gogh is not the Van Gogh we all know today without the help of two other important characters. His brother, Theo, an art dealer, supported Vincent both financially and emotionally. Theo, crippled with grief, died only six months after Vincent passed, which might hint at the incredible connection the two brothers had. The other character can be credited with fueling what has become an enduring legacy. Joe, or Joanna, Theo's wife. Theo owned nearly the entire collection of Vincent's work at the time of his passing, leaving them with Joe. The collection at the time was nearly worthless. It was she who worked tirelessly to promote Vincent's work through exhibitions, and it was she who published the letters sent between the two brothers, which is how I was even able to know what his daily routine looked like. It was through her work that the world could discover the incredible story of this artist. Without her, Vincent might have forever been obscure 19th century post-impressionist painter. So I'm struggling a little bit to get into the flow of things today. I think I'm a little bit tired. Yesterday the hours flew by. I was able to get fully focused and when you're working on something like painting you don't even think. It's actually a lovely feeling but there's an intensity to it. Between that intensity and the absinthe I drank last night which made me feel sleepy but didn't contribute to a good night's sleep, today I'm I'm dragging my feet a little bit. I am going to really try to get into a flow here. It seemed like Van Gogh was all or nothing. He didn't take very many breaks. Which is not something I'm used to, but there's something to that. I think we all probably need breaks, but we live in a world where the dominant culture is constant interruptions. There's constant switching of focus. And I have noticed that when I get into the flow when working on a painting, if I'm really, really focused, I'm able to make a lot of progress very quickly. and also I think the quality of my work increases as well. The brushstrokes are more confident and I know where to layer. It's kind of like I can't do that if I'm doing things in short, distracted bursts. You know, it's funny. The world that we live in as compared to the world that Van Gogh lived in has so much more technology. We have such easier access to very powerful tools to make and do things, right? I'm literally holding a microphone that doubles as my phone. You know, he didn't have the distractions that we have. Perhaps it was easier to get into a flow state because there was less to distract yourself with, right? What was he going to do? Listen to a podcast? Play video games? I don't think so. It's funny, it makes me think. The tools at our disposal aren't worth anything if we don't have the systems and the right approach to make the best of them. Van Gogh didn't need advanced technology to be incredibly prolific and to do incredible work. Makes you think. But in order to do good work, you have to eat well. Be well housed. have a screw from time to time, smoke your pipe, and drink your coffee in peace. I'm not saying that the rest counts for nothing, and leave everyone free to do as he sees fit, but I do say that this system seems preferable to many others to me. That's from a letter written by Van Gogh to Emile Bernard from Arles, sometime late September 1888. Alright, I think it's coming along pretty well. I think it's, uh, it's not looking too bad. This is the setup right now. Wow, I'm wiped. That has been a lot of painting these last few days. It requires a lot of concentration and effort and I'm feeling fatigued. Dang. Part of my fatigue, I think, aside from the intensity of the work, came from my poor and limited diet. I at first began with nothing but bread, but I eventually caved and added potatoes that I cooked with butter. The difference having warm food made, if even just potatoes, stunned me. What a luxury for me to to never really have to worry about these things. I actually got the inspiration to make this video when visiting the Musée d'Orsay in Paris with my parents a few weeks earlier and seeing the impact the paintings had on us. There was something special about it. Look, look at that one. I know. The super famous one. I wanna get to that. I wanted to look at that and then focus on that. You're saving like the best part of the dish? Yeah, yeah. You know, I wonder how people would feel today if they got the chance to meet Van Gogh. Apparently he had terrible hygiene. He had a lot of strange behavior. He was an intense guy. When he's painting, I could see the joy. But I think so many people respect what he does because he took no shortcuts. He really stood for something. He didn't let the fact that most people didn't understand or appreciate his work stop him from doing that work. That's incredible. That's very courageous. It's like he breaks every rule. Yeah, it's all distorted. The perspective is all... Look, the paintings are not even hung properly. No. it's like we all benefit from those that really stand for something there's a symbolic value to that if van gogh could do it i can also be uncompromising my work i can also pour my soul into the things that i do all right yet another one it's coming along got a long way to go but i like how it's taking shape this is model after a photo i took in versailles i love how dramatic it is you know this whole experience all of this that i've been doing for the last few days has really made me grateful for the life that I have because I get to do this cool experiment and I get to make some art. I get to learn a lot about a very special guy in history. But then I get to go back to my life where I make things like this video that people appreciate while I'm alive. People like you watching this video. That's a real luxury. That's a really cool thing to be able to enjoy. I'm really lucky. He didn't have that. You know, he had a really supportive brother. He had a really supportive sister-in-law. He had some friends, but beyond that people didn't get what he did And I guess in some ways you could say it's sad because he didn't have that But in some ways I find it beautiful Because he did it anyway Good for him

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Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro
1:51 – The Routine
2:52 – I Begin
4:37 – Van Gogh's Relationship to Food
5:46 – The Routine (continued)
7:11 – Van Gogh's Relationship to Alcohol
7:58 – More Painting
8:27 – Sponsor
9:51 – Two People That Made Van Gogh's Legacy Possible
10:47 – Challenges with the Routine
13:41 – Reacting to His Work
14:34 – What This Taught Me