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Dare To Lead With Words And Love
What you need to understand to become a heart centered leader in a complex world
The Van Gogh painting above has never been found. The story goes that it was moved to a salt mine near the German town of Stassfurt in 1942 in anticipation of Allied bombing. Then a few hours after the liberation of the area by US troops on April 12, 1945, fires were started, perhaps deliberately by opportunists, to provide cover as they made off with a number of paintings including this one.
A Question
“Mastery is not perfection it is the pursuit of perfection.”
Was Van Gogh the figure torn between genius and desire, as played by Kirk Douglas in the 1956 Hollywood film, ‘Lust for Life’? Or was he sincere, sensitive and neurotic as played by Willem Dafoe in the 2018 film, ‘At Eternity’s Gate’’?
Were his paintings the workings of the troubled mind of an ear-cutting madman, a bellicose drinker who threatened his friend Paul Gaugin with a razor and gave the remains of his mutilated ear to a local sex worker. Or was something else going on?
In the 15 months he spent in Arles a coastal town in the South of France, Van Gogh was ridiculously prodigious. He completed close to 200 paintings and sheaf's of drawings and worked unstoppably, but also deliberately.
He was not an artist painting in a trance. He was an artist painting as an act of translation. Inventing a new pictorial language as he worked, and from his letters of that time a lucid, discursive, insightful, self-aware and resourceful problem solver is revealed.
Whatever the myth, fiction or reality, he was human and prone to all the contradictions, vicissitudes, heights of joy and depths of despair we all experience and so keenly feel.
The State of Things Today
“Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.” — Lucien Freud
What does it mean to be human and what does it take to be a Heart Centered Leader and navigate in today’s…
