Catherine Corri : Vincent

The closeness of a family is not something that I am familiar with. My only experience of love is in the correspondence that I shared with my brother through some desolate and lonely years; years in which we have become old and departed, but never separated. In numerous letters, which I have in my possession, I would pose worried and aggressive questions about my financial situation to my brother, but his state of mind prevented any answers being given, let alone, in later years, any sort of financial support. At the age of thirty two the fact that I am no longer financially secure is shattering for me, for in the early days I could do whatever I pleased whenever I wanted to. You see, my brother would always send me money – thousands of pounds wrapped up in an old cloth would arrive at my home every three months. I did not ask where it came from, but instead dallied with the thought that he had earned it from his silly paintings. I very often had wanted my brother to spend the holidays with me, but he preferred to stay in Holland painting the end of a lonely life.

Immolating himself in the fury of his work, I now know that he he soon became aware of the deceptive quiescence of his illness. He poured his desolation and loneliness into landscape pictures; cornfields whose ominous brushstrokes contained dynamic rhythms of colour and broad energy that articulate and move the senses but they were always over-arched by dominant stormy skies. I think my brother was mad, although in those days madness was looked upon as some sort of perverted genius and he was never treated or hospitalized in his moments of madness. He had an avid interest in the outdoor life simply because as children we were forbidden to leave the confines of the house – nature and the experience of nature consisted only of cultivated ornamented plants scattered about the house like a small reproduction of some kind of internal nirvana.

Later, when we were aged ten and thirteen and understood fully that paradise was elsewhere we were allowed small tours of the garden which were truly magnificent. It was during this time that my brother developed a taste for blossoming orchards and twisted, gnarled olive trees whose surfaces were no longer used exclusively to represent individual objects, but rather mirrored the internal mechanisms of his beautiful mind.  Painting from memory, my brother always painted the face of his own despair never thinking for once that I might be in despair too. Attacks of hallucinations and aural delusions were, he explained to me, a consequence of external influences. Soon he started to paint long institutional corridors and iron barred windows – to be truthful he slaved away like a madman in an attempt to set me free from my debts and inadvertently caused me such pain.

All that I see now is an all-embracing, wild, blinding glow – the whole of nature in crazy convolutions in a raging frenzy against life. Until the last years of his life my brother had perfect eyesight – a meticulous attention to detail – now all that is gone and I am left fighting against his rage with nothing to my name and no gift to rely upon other than memory. When he hid all of his paintings in the cellar of his house he covered them over with old dust-sheets and they were not discovered by me until three months after his death. I have burned them all. In my madness, I am still writing to him, but he never replies. On my bedside table I have a vase of sunflowers and beside my bed an old battered chair.

‘Deformation as a definition of an object is a rare thing’ I can hear him say. ‘You can reduce to rubble yourself, go mad and commit sin, but love is enduring and money the root of all evil. The closeness of a family is not something that I am familiar with. I will write to you no more’.

Sensing another attack of madness he set a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.

Now I am alone and know how to look at myself at the end of a lonely life. In my existence and late fame I have betrayed my brother, my keeper and my friend by seeing nothing but ornamented plants scattered about my house like a small insignificant nirvana. I have nothing only letters to name him with and the memory of  his wide brush-stroke applied to a pure white canvas tangled with his tales.