What is your opinion?
What right had he to be unhappy, living in a perfectly painted world . . .?
"Read this story with Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" blaring in the background. Sort of a spiritual experience. Relates the struggle for perfection that many artists long ago gave away in exchange for their sanity. Reflects the tussle with madness beside the sparkling waters of the Rhone. Demonstrates how perfection is sometimes accidental; unlooked-for; how it arrives when you least expect it. How it comes more easily when you're not looking for it. (Which isn't a promise that it WILL come. You may simply spend years searching for a perfection that can't be found.) Excellent story, though! Loved every line. Sort of like poetry in prose. Well done, Madly A. Hatter. Cheers."
"Balance..."
"A few times in the story, Van Gogh mutters this single word to himself: "balance," as if trying to remind himself how one stays sane or makes it from one sunrise to the next. Of course, the word also invokes his struggle to create art itself, which is a tenuous balance between inspiration and technique, which is all the more difficult when you're breaking with tradition and enlarging the scope of 19th century art. This story beautifully offers a vignette of Van Gogh's life as he tries to capture the people in his paintings, all while his own life and sanity is falling apart. There's not a word out of place, and all the images and metaphors are as deftly applied as Van Gogh's paints--even more striking when you re-read the story and see the bigger picture unfold. If you're looking for a shocking plot twist or outrageous historical gossip you won't find it here, but if you enjoy a character-driven prose poem, which unfolds slowly but is over far too quickly, this is the story for you. It's rare to find writers with the courage to simply write, without worrying about paragraphs being too long or action being too slow. This story is all technique, mood, and...balance. And more importantly, I believed every word, as if it came straight from a biography of Van Gogh himself (and I've read a complete collection of his letters to his brother; even so, nothing rang false). In short, a masterpiece in miniature."
