Aesthetically handicapped??!!

Friend’s face was beaming with zeal. He was trying to explain the greatness of Vincent Van Gogh.

Friend: Vincent Van Gogh is the Bob Marley of painting.
Me: Really? Who is Bob Marley?
Friend: Bob Marley is the Babe Ruth of Reggae.
Me: Oh! Who is this Babe Ruth, by the way?
Friend: Babe Ruth is the Mohammed Ali of baseball.
Me: The Jinnah?
Friend: No. This Mohammed Ali is the Sir Don Bradman of Boxing.
Me: Is it? And, Sir Don Bradman is...
Friend: Grrr...
I ran away from that place before the friend could bite me. Anyway, it was a treat to watch the friend’s radiant face slowly turning into that of a rabies infected hound. It is always fun to flirt around the verge of others’ temper. You should just know when to stop, in order to come out of it unscathed sans bruises and broken bones.

The point is, I came to know that this Van Gogh guy was some hotshot painter and that with my current salary, I will have to work for a few centuries to save enough money to buy one of his paintings. So, I was more than happy to step into the Van Gogh Museum. The museum was pretty crowded, yet very silent. I couldn’t help remembering the level of noise that the handful of my classmates were able to make. The pace at which people moved from one painting to another, snails could easily beat them all. It seemed like the crowd would stand there staring at the paintings for ever. I was told that Van Gogh was not into sculptures. Else, I would have mistaken some of the visitors for statues in fancy dresses.

At the museum, I learnt that Van Gogh cut off a part of his own left earlobe. Shaving mishap? There are only three photographs of Van Gogh. At the age of 37, he shot himself twice in the chest and died two days later. Spooky. Midlife crisis, ehhh? He made some 900 paintings during the last 10 years of his life. So, on an average, he made 90 paintings an year. That means he made a new painting every four days. Holy crap!

The museum also has paintings and photographs by other artists. I remember two photographs among them. One was that of Gandhi, shot with camera just few minutes before he was shot with a pistol. In that photograph, Gandhi was walking along a small crowd, probably to his final destination, with a pretty peaceful expression on his face, totally unaware that he will shortly be shot by a man of his own country, the country for whose freedom he had struggled for some 30 years. A violent death for a person who believed in non-violence more than anything else.

The other photograph is a scene that we can see anywhere in the world. It is that of a pretty woman walking down a street. All the others in the photographs are males of various ages and every single one of them looks at the woman while she walks along completely unaware of the attention she was receiving. Cute photograph. I am sure Roy Orbison would have loved to have that photograph on his record cover.

I learnt a very important lesson in my visit to the museum – “I am blind to paintings”. I have nothing against paintings and painters. The problem is with me. I still am not able to figure out how great Monalisa is compared to the portrait of my grand mom, or any other portrait for that matter. My domain is different. I can relish music, poetry and literature. I can recognize a good piece of code when I see one. I can enjoy a few sports. I can differentiate good video games from the mediocre ones. But, paintings... Painting is not in my domain. Not yet.