I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam when I was in
high school. At the time, the paintings
were arranged in the order he painted them.
His deterioration was extremely obvious.
The details fade away and the colors and distortion get stronger. It was a very unforgettable experience.
This is what I now understand. He knew something was happening to him
inside. He was fucked up, but he wanted
people to know he wasn’t insane- that he was still in there and aware. He knew nobody knew how to help him. He was documenting himself in the best way he
knew how. He knew what I figured out,
the inner torment visibly manifests as changes in your face….
This is what most people don’t know: He had terrible teeth. His early obsessions fostered a terrible diet
and terrible hygiene and he let his teeth rot in his head. The infections and
resulting surgery drastically affected his face. By the time he was hospitalized, his upper
jaws were toast and the nerves were inflamed all the way into his
eyebrows. This nerve dysfunction caused
his signature swirly visual effects.
The swirls and sparkles are not an avant-garde artistic
innovation, they are real visual phenomenon.
The man was recording his symptoms as accurately as he could. For posterity. Until someone figured out what it was…
I know this because it happened to me. When my dementia was very bad. When I didn’t brush my teeth. When my gums were black and my face was
swollen. I was gardening in the summer
and wearing a hat. My left eyebrow had
been twitching most of the week. At one
point Jeff came out of the house and asked me a question. I looked up and my vision was swirly. On the left side of the left eye only. It was very frightening. I told Jeff to walk me into the house. I sat down, took off the hat, and the
swirling stopped. Later in the week,
it happened again. I took off the hat
again. It stopped again.
I was floridly ill, but I knew that was a clue. I was so demented; I don’t know how long it
took me to think of Vincent. Maybe
months. But when I did, I put “Van Gogh
Teeth” into google and found this excerpt.
“In consequence of his eating badly because of the misery in
the Borinage, Vincent lost a dozen teeth. Adding to his poorly-clad wretch
looks, his toothless smile must have repelled people. “
It was a revelation.
I’ve been researching teeth and facial nerves ever since. I have only had that experience one more
time. I was very sick again and I was
wearing a hat…
Look at the first painting. Look into
his eyes. He was a master. The eyes are perfect.
He paints his pain in red.
See the temple? That’s where the
ethmoid sinuses are. When they swell up,
they cause the swirly effect. His
frontal sinuses (under the eyebrows) are really swollen too. That whole right side of his face is
throbbing.
The parotid salivary gland wraps around a nerve that runs
straight into the ear. When it is
pinched, it hurts like a ice cold poker, straight into your brain. He cut off his ear because he thought it
would help. I’m sure it didn’t, so he
didn’t talk about it. He couldn’t admit he was wrong. The interesting thing is- that nerve affects
only the tragus and the top half of the pinna…. That’s why he didn’t cut off
the bottom.
The second one is my favorite painting. He painted
it about a year before his death. He got
it exactly right. The swirls look
exactly like that. Exactly like water
running over your eyeball. It’s like a
photograph from inside his head. He
clearly had it on both sides, and it leaves the center unaffected.
Now look at his eyebrows.
Can you see the huge red bumps? Those
are the frontal sinuses. That swelling
is a sign those ducts are clogged. It’s
astonishing. He succeeded in capturing
the whole phenomenon in one image
He didn't know what it was. But he knew if he
kept painting himself, he just might capture it.
This man was a dedicated naturalist of the highest
order.
Self
Portraits in order It’s very obvious when the eyes become affected.
I also need to mention that the reason we have this collection is the obsession of his wife Johanna. She knew he was documenting his own demise. She's a notable historian and archivist on her own.
