Paul Gauguin
Our family has a bit of a history with Paul Gauguin, because Gauguin was my husband's favourite Artist. Farlan was an artist too. His paintings weren't a lot like Pauls, except for plenty of nude women, but Farlan seemed to have a special understanding of Gauguins paintings and an understanding of Paul the man.
Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker who came to painting quite late in his life. He began painting in his 30's, first as a hobby, just at weekends, but it wasn't long before he embraced his new love absolutely, much to the chagrin of his wife Mette Sofie Gadd, who missed the money and the bourgeois lifestyle. Pauls artistic road was a hard one and led him to poverty and aloneness - he gave up everything to follow his dream. His search for paradise led him to the South Seas to Polynesia. But he didn't find paradise on the Marquesas or Tahiti - he found a native people being destroyed by the clergy and corrupt European officials. But he did find paradise within himself, and it's all there in his paintings - the eternal peace and bliss that he bequeathed to the world when he died on May 9th 1903 aged 54.
Farlan had lots of books on Gauguin. Every birthday you knew the first gift he'd be looking for would be a new Gauguin book. Eventually we ran out of new Gauguin books to get him, so we took to painting him portraits of Gauguin, doing copies of Gauguins painting and once we sculpted him a bust of Gauguin that sits on our mantlepiece to this day. It's not the magnificent, arrogant, hook nosed Gauguin that he painted himself. Ours is a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy Gauguin. I suspect both were true. You need a bit of arrogance to get through a life like Gauguins. Farlan had a bit of arrogance too, which he needed. Like Gauguin, he embraced his great love, music, in his mid 30's. He sought paradise too and the search was long and hard, like his "old mate Paul's", only he never went searching for far away paradisiacal islands. The nearest he got to an Island was Orkney, paradise of a kind in its treeless way, but like "The Blessed Paul" the real paradise Farlan found was within himself and he put it all into his
music. He died young, just 58, and like Gauguin he also left behind a beautiful legacy. Not paintings but songs. Songs of great beauty and emotional power. Towards the end of his life he wrote a song called "The Master". It's about Paul Gauguin. But it's also about Farlan and any Artist or person who reaches beyond the boundaries to bring something beautiful and special into the world. A little touch of that other worldy paradise and bliss. You can listen to "The Master" here on Farlan's website www.farlanhardy.net You can also read Farlans account of "Paul and Vincent and what really happened in the yellow house at Arles." Of course coming from a Gauguin fanatic it might be a bit biased. You can up your own mind about that by reading it here.
text: Arifah Hardy
Images: n/a.