The sense of overwhelming, one often experiences in encountering van Gogh’s paintings, which conjures whether melancholy, passion, compassion or violence. Intriguingly, the painted objects are merely scenery, figures, houses, rooms, shoes or fruit, no more than ordinary things, but where does this resonating power come from?
Van Gogh has a large number of sketches exist. These monotone pieces serve as a contrast to those crazily commercialized famous paintings, and represent another side of so-called “crazy van Gogh.” The sketches are like the passionate sketches, crazy blue prints, salvational plans, and non-logical logic.
If, he was crazy, could he still have painted those pictures? If we can experience the power of his pictorial tension, do we also have the potential of being crazy? Is van Gogh’s mental status a disease or a symbol of existence? Are his paintings the murmurs of a mental patient or pictures of a victim? Or both?
This is a play about van Gogh and his sketches, a picture that portrays a condition of existence where one is skinned and in agony but while trying to obtain quietness.