YIN YANG – Story of a travel artist

(Average Reading Time: 10 mins)

1890, Northern France

It was late in the evening. Oscar was sitting on a chair in his porch staring in blankness. He had wrapped a blanket around him and was lost in the thoughts of his deceased wife. He was suffering, and it felt like a piece of his soul had been torn apart and separated. Despite being an artist, Oscar hadn’t picked up his brush in over a month. His wife’s death had stalled not only his but also the life of his little son.

A floor above his was living Alice and her year-old baby. The tables of life had turned in such a way that Alice who was married to a wealthy businessman had to give up her swanky lifestyle due to bankruptcy. As her husband set out to find new business opportunities, Alice sought new shelter. Oscar met Alice and her husband Eterat on a painting assignment where they became family friends.

After Eterat’s bankruptcy, Oscar invited Alice to come live with them while her husband traveled to rebuild his wealth. It was an arrangement that would suit both the families. Alice looked after the kids and kept the house running while it gave Oscar time to venture out in search of scenic landscapes to paint. Amidst the tough times, friendship between Oscar and Alice started to bloom. They spent time talking to each other and sharing stories about early life and hardships.

As a painter, Oscar would often travel for his assignments. It gave him a sense of freedom from the monotony of life. However, this time it was tough for him to leave his son alone. With Alice’s entry into his life and the new arrangement, his hesitation alleviated and Oscar stepped out on his journey after months. He promised to write letters to Alice asking about everyone’s well-being.

His first stop was Italy.

There was something unexplainable about the city that felt therapeutic. Distant from the drama back home, it was like having a second life in Italy. He spotted beautiful places, made new friends, and was able to focus on art once again. One such friend was Lucas. He owned a restaurant that attracted travelers and by-passers due to its vicinity to the port. As Oscar became a regular at Luka’s restaurant, he met few other painters, philosophers, and story-tellers; and it soon became a group hanging out regularly. They would go out in search of beautiful landscapes, paint during the day, and spend nights drinking and sharing stories. In one of those days Oscar met a young painter named Van Gogh. He remained secluded from the group but Oscar was in awe of his strokes.

On one such outing, they discovered a scenic view from over the cliff. It was a vantage point from where one could see a lighthouse surrounded by coconut palms, water falling from a height and uniting gracefully with the sea. Staring at the beautiful landscape, Oscar and Van Gogh kept painting for hours in silence standing next to each other. To someone looking from a distance, it would appear like two painters painting the same landscape but when it was ready, both had very different renditions. In Oscar’s painting, one could see the nuances of light, color, and overall finesse, while Van Gogh’s painting was bold, dark, and had glimpses of anger and sadness.

Life continued for both the painters in separate directions as they moved on with their journey but Oscar often thought of Van Gogh and his mature art. As an art form, Oscar understood the difficulties of coming up with great paintings and then marketing them to find the right buyer. While some painters handled it well, some didn’t. A few weeks later Van Gogh committed suicide. The news spread like wildfire. Oscar’s world had stopped the moment he heard about it. He couldn’t eat, sleep and he couldn’t paint.

“Today I am devastated,” wrote Oscar in his letter to Alice back home. “I was just recovering from my wife’s death that I heard of Van Gogh’s suicide. He was a gem of an artist. It’s unfortunate that modern world will never get to see the brilliance of his magic again.” People started looking into Van Gogh’s art seriously and found profoundness in his work. It became an art form in itself called Impressionism. While the world was lost in admiration for Van Gogh’s art, Oscar had a lot of questions swirling in his mind. Questions to which he had no answers, questions that kept him awake at night, and questions that put him in an existential crisis.

Oscar reached Zurich after a few days. It was a beautiful city. But even in those scenic landscapes, he was suffering. “Suffering is a vicious cycle”, he wrote to Alice in his next letter, “Sometimes I feel I’ve overcome the pain and healed, but then in the next moment there’s a rush of loneliness and the void suffocates me. Sometimes I decide to leave aside all the pain and just focus on the canvas… but the pain doesn’t leave me, it pierces my heart with excruciating pain and I wish it was all just a bad dream. Perhaps, there is some meaning to suffering in life.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your friend. But that’s the part of suffering we don’t understand.” Alice replied in her letter. “Suffering needs an outlet; every person needs to have a channel to let his suffering out. For some it’s art, for some it’s companionship– but your emotions need to pour out before they stack up within you and take a monstrous form. Venting neutralizes pain. I want you to know that I’m always here if you ever feel like venting out. And I also want you to know that healing isn’t linear, it happens in phases. You may think you’ve healed, and then out of nowhere, it will hit you again. It might then feel like you haven’t healed at all, but know that it’s just a part of the healing process, and if you look back to how you were a few weeks, or a few months ago, you’ll realize how much you’ve actually grown.”

Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months – Oscar hadn’t touched his canvas. He kept traveling across Europe with his grown hair and long beard like a hippie. After months of travel, he arrived in Italy again. It was the place that gave him a kind of mystical relief and strength to fight his inner devils. He swayed along the river banks during the day and spent evenings chatting with his old friend Lucas at his restaurant. On one such evening, the two had gone out wandering in the wild. Lucas was taking a stroll while Oscar was sitting quietly relishing nature. Birds chirping, subtle sound of waves hitting the shore, and nature’s tranquility; there was stillness around him… but within him… within him there was turmoil and chaos.

Unknowingly, in that silent hour of the day, the memories which had subsided for a while came back gushing at him. There were tears in his eyes and the breath got deeper. This time, however, instead of distracting his mind he let those memories inflict him pain. He allowed himself to cry freely. It was a transcending moment… and then unexpectedly, after months of staying away from it, his hand slowly drifted to his bag pulling out the canvas instinctively. He stood up, set up his canvas, and began painting the view. He painted for hours, unwaveringly. And when he was done, he couldn’t believe what had come out of his hands. It looked like nature itself had stepped out on his canvas. It was magical. It was not just the raw strokes but also his journey to find the meaning of suffering that had made its way to the canvas.

Oscar stepped back and kept staring at his work. He wondered how gorgeous the color pallet looked on the canvas with all the different shades and blends. And then, in that moment, it dawned on him – the meaning of suffering. Effect of those colors was because of the blank canvas. Effect of sound is because of silence. It’s the absence that compliments the presence. Life is very ironic in that sense, he realized. It takes sadness to appreciate happiness. And it’s the suffering that makes you treasure the pleasures in life.

Oscar met a lot of people and heard a lot of stories along his journey. It made him understand that pleasure and suffering are opposite energies interwoven by the delicate fabric of life. It’s yin and yang. Life rotates in such cycles of yin and yang. In every yin, there is a seed of yang. Likewise, every pleasure in life has a seed of future suffering… and in every suffering there are escape points to pleasure. Looking at the finesse of his painting he realized that his distance from the canvas had in fact brought him even more close to it. His distance from the canvas was yin, and his return to art was yang. That was the meaning of suffering. It compliments life. It completes life. And it helps you appreciate life.

Lucas was stunned when he saw the painting. He felt lucky to be the first person to see this piece of art. For Oscar, it was his breakthrough after months and he felt the desire to share this moment with someone, with someone really close, with someone he felt connected with… with Alice. Looking at Lucas he sadly said, “I wish… I wish there was a way, you know, like some kind of medium, that would’ve enabled me to share this moment with Alice far away.”

Lucas smiled. “Oscar, you know, there will be a time in the future when people will have all the means and abilities to communicate with each other… and yet they will not be able to express what they really feel.” He marveled at the painting and continued, “But, the fact that you thought about her in this pivotal moment means something… it means you have a genuine connection with her. It’s rare to find a real connection in life… and you know why?” he looked at Oscar’s curious face, “it’s because true connections can neither be created nor destroyed. It’s either there… or it’s not. You know, it’s like your soul identifying its natural match. God took away your wife but, you see, he didn’t leave you incomplete – he replaced it with a genuine connection. He balanced your yin with a yang. You should celebrate her.”

Sometimes someone says something casually and it gives you a whole new perspective. This was that flash for Oscar. He pondered upon what Lucas had just said and then calmly replied, “No. I don’t want the world to know about our connection. It would mean labeling our relation and doing so will put us in a framework. Sometimes, there is freedom in ambiguity. I’m happy to have found a pure connection. And why should every relation be even known to the world; some are to be kept private. It is celebrated, it is appreciated… but just between us.”

That night Oscar went home, took a long bath, and then sat down quietly to write to Alice, “I’m sitting in front of a bonfire and writing you this letter. I feel liberated after a long time today. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I was sitting with so much inner peace and calm. The sky is clear after days… and the sparkling stars are looking at me in awe. They have been my only companion in this long journey. The nature too looks very serene today and the sweet floral fragrance of lavender has aromatized my surrounding. I’m describing all this to you only because writing this in the same moment while I experience it makes me feel like you are here with me and sharing this beautiful night. I don’t know how long it took me to complete that painting but I know today, in that hour, when I completed the painting, my new life started. I realized that I wasn’t the same person who had set out on this journey. The person within me now is someone new. Someone who understands how minuscule and petty his problems were in front of the wide canvas of the world. Someone who understands how humans overvalue their presence and over agonize their pain, and someone who realizes that suffering is an elixir that helps you stay connected with the realities of life. While some sufferings break you in a way that you won’t be the same again, the universe never leaves you incomplete – it always replaces what has been taken away from you with something better. Today, after months of travel, I have begun to understand myself a little more. I’m not just an artist anymore, or a curious soul wandering around in oblivion – I am actually both. I am lost, I am found, and I am yin-yang.