"Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it." — Vincent van Gogh.
I am not an artist. My mind works in spreadsheets, algorithms, and logic gates. I find comfort in binary certainties, in problems that have clear solutions. And yet, for reasons I couldn't initially articulate, I spent a month traveling across Europe with a singular, obsessive purpose: to stand in front of every Vincent van Gogh painting I could find.
It was a pilgrimage of sorts. From the sanitized, hushed halls of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and finally to the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. I was chasing a ghost. I was chasing the man who cut off his ear and painted the world not as it looked, but as it felt.
The first time I stood in front of one of his self-portraits, I forgot to breathe. It wasn't the image of the man that struck me; it was the eyes. They were piercing, desperate, and terrifyingly alive. And then there was the texture. In textbooks and on screens, paintings are flat. But in reality, Van Gogh's canvases are topographical maps of his psyche. The paint is thick, sculptural, slashed onto the canvas with a frantic urgency. You can see the bristles of his brush. You can see the violence of his creation.
Why does a logical mind fall in love with a chaotic one? Perhaps because we crave what we lack. My world is ordered, predictable, and safe. Vincent’s world was a maelstrom of emotion, a sensory overload that eventually consumed him. Looking at "The Starry Night," I didn't see an astronomical representation of the sky. I saw the vibration of the universe. I saw the wind made visible. I saw a man screaming into the void and finding beauty in the echo.
It is easy to romanticize the "tortured artist," to view his mental illness as the source of his genius. But reading his letters to his brother Theo, you realize how wrong that is. He didn't paint because he was mad; he painted to keep from going mad. Painting was his anchor. It was his desperate attempt to impose order on the chaos inside his head. To wrestle the demons onto the canvas and pin them down with yellow ochre and cobalt blue.
"I dream my painting and I paint my dream," he wrote.
Walking through the Musée d'Orsay, seeing the "Church at Auvers," I felt a profound sadness. The building in the painting seems to be melting, warping under the pressure of an invisible weight. It is a portrait of instability. And yet, the colors are vibrant, almost aggressive in their cheerfulness. It is this tension—the coexistence of profound suffering and an ecstatic love for the world—that makes his work so magnetic. He loved the world that hurt him. He saw divinity in a pair of worn-out boots, in a chair, in a vase of dying sunflowers.
I think that is what I was chasing. I was chasing that intensity of feeling. In our modern, ironic, detached lives, we are often afraid to feel too much. We protect ourselves with layers of cynicism. Vincent had no skin. He was exposed. Every color burned him. Every wheat field was a revelation. To stand before his work is to be invited to drop your shield. To admit that the world is overwhelming, and frightening, and spectacularly beautiful.
In Arles, looking at the yellow house (or where it used to be), I thought about loneliness. Vincent was profoundly lonely. He desperately wanted to create a community of artists, a brotherhood of shared vision. He failed. He drove people away. He was difficult, intense, and manic. And yet, his paintings are an extended hand. They are a plea: "Do you see this? Do you see how the light hits the cypress tree? Do you feel it too?"
Art is a bridge across time. It allows a Dutch man who died in 1890 to reach out and grab a coder from 2026 by the collar and say, "Look." And I looked.
The final stop was a small field near Auvers-sur-Oise. It is widely believed to be the setting of his ominous painting, "Wheatfield with Crows." Standing there, under a sky that threatened storms, I felt the weight of his final days.
The canvas is split. The bottom is a violent, turbulent sea of gold wheat, bending under an invisible wind. The top is a darkening, oppressive blue sky. And in the middle, a flock of crows—black, chaotic brushstrokes—flies straight out at the viewer. There is no path out. The roads go nowhere. It is a cul-de-sac of despair.
But even here, in the depths of his depression, the colors are alive. The yellow screams. The blue vibrates. It is not the dull grey of apathy; it is the frantic energy of a man fighting for his life.
This painting changed me. I realized that my own "burnout"—my numbness, my cynical detachment—was a luxury. Vincent didn't have the luxury of apathy. He felt everything, all the time, at maximum volume. And he transmuted that pain into something that, 136 years later, can still make a stranger weep in a museum.
I learned that there is a logic to emotion, just as there is an emotion to logic. The impasto technique—that thick, chaotic layering of paint—imparts a physical reality to the image. It captures the light, casting micro-shadows on the canvas itself. It changes as you move around it. It is dynamic. It is alive.
I left Europe with a different way of seeing. I noticed the way the streetlights blurred in the rain, recalling the "Terrace of a Café at Night." I noticed the gnarled bark of the olive trees. I allowed myself to be a little less rigid, a little less paved.
"Normality is a paved road," he said. I have spent my life paving roads, ensuring smooth transit, predictable outcomes. But Vincent taught me to step off the pavement. To walk in the dirt. To look for the flowers that grow in the ditch.
We need the madmen, the visionaries, the ones who feel too much. They burn themselves out to light the way for the rest of us. They teach us that it is okay to be broken, as long as you keep painting.
Chasing Vincent was never really about the paintings. It was about finding the capacity for wonder in my own analytical heart. It was about allowing the chaos in. And finding that, actually, the yellow is brighter when you aren't afraid of the dark.