‘When you see a Gauguin,’ writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, ‘you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a Van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.’

Artists are supposed to be our designated crazies.

They lived oceans apart in the later days of the 19th century, Earp the gunslinger, Van Gogh the psychedelic sower.

From a distance, they could be brothers. At the moment I'm feeling a bit too boringly sane to editorialize further, but we can track their smokey trails in these two eloquent documents.

Notes from American Experience - Wyatt Earp on PBS:

Profound ideas arise out of chaos. Madness. Risk. 

‘The sower broadcasting his seed was an image that had been with him almost since he had become an artist. It stood for a painter - or an evangelist - sowing the seed of beauty and truth.’
Martin Gayford, The Yellow House: Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles