The student artist has been staring at the daisies for three hours.
Passersby stop to look at his blank canvas positioned in the halls of the C building, underneath 20 student versions of a postmodern
Barack Obama portrait. They watch as his paintbrush hesitates above the newspaper he’s lain on the ground, to catch teaspoons of oil paint drippings.
“This dude,” said Charles Decruq, a returning student, from a doorway ten feet away. “He’s, you know, hella good when he
gets started.”
Then why stand so far away?
“He looks kind of crazy just staring at those damn daisies is all.”
The artist, a first year foreign exchange student, arrived at the college from the Netherlands last fall.
Vincent Van Gogh is 45, but his teachers, including new Art 505 teacher Fakey McFakerson say he carries himself with the grace of someone considerably older.
At the age of fifteen, Van Gogh dropped out of high school to work with art dealers Goupil & Cie in the Hague. The trip, and the subsequent tours they would take, opened his mind, he said.
“And so did a few other things,” he added.
Turning to a religious life, Van Gogh tried working several years later as a Protestant missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes in Belgium. Years of the work tired him, he said, and he decided to turn to his first spiritual instinct: art.
A whim he said he felt one night upon looking at the night sky while on a holiday to visit the church branch near the Tower of London, Van Gogh said he wonders how he couldn’t have seen it in himself before.
“Right then, I wanted to paint the voice of the moon,” he said. “I could hear sing, and I could hear the remembered songs of many others who once stared at her for the last time from here.”
Unfortunately, after the post-Impressionist movement assimilated itself into mainstream pop-culture, up and coming artists like Van Gogh and his roommate, Paul Gaugin, found the European Emo-artist market cramped for space.
“I couldn’t get work anywhere,” he said. “Plus the economy is so bad, a guy’s gotta cut off his left ear to get noticed around here.”
Re-education through the college’s Artist Re-Training Program is Van Gogh’s current plan. After that, he hopes to return to Europe with a few new skills, such as in digital film and photography, to enhance his résumé.
He said the atmosphere on the campus inspires him, and he is most excited about the challenge of the campus’s vast resources of empty, box-shaped, brick space.
But sometimes, he said, it makes him feel claustrophobic.
“I’ll get over it.” he said.