Almighty painter

Chapter 1004 The Heart of Van Gogh
Fate is a thing that is always difficult to fully explain.

Robert Kent had never imagined he could have any direct connection with the art industry until he accidentally flipped through an elegant magazine in a restaurant.

Two years ago, he was studying Tasituo's *Chronicles* on his laptop. Two years later, he had flown to Abu Dhabi, harboring ambitions to complete an art biography. A day ago, he was still thinking about getting some juicy gossip out of Dyke Anlen. A day later, he had listened face-to-face with Sara, the most powerful person in the entire art industry, who dissected an exhibition into fine dust and filtered out the gold dust from the ashes.

These extraordinary encounters planted the seeds of curiosity in his heart.

He exchanged polite greetings and said goodbye to Director Sarah, then got up and walked toward the exhibition hall of the Maes Gallery, which was not far away.

There were more visitors in the exhibition hall than Robert had imagined.

And everything was very quiet.

Robert weaved through the gaps in the crowd, as if walking through a silent forest. The exhibition itself was meticulously arranged, with ten paintings displayed in the 300-square-meter gallery, dividing the walls and floor into different spaces.

A burning sun, a swirling starry sky, sunrise, sunset, rose fields, cypress-shaded forests...

he noticed.

The curator arranged a very complex lighting system in the exhibition hall. The lighting effects between each exhibition booth were completely different. Some booths had a cooler tone, while others had a warmer tone. Even the floor tiles between the exhibition booths and the booths had slightly different tones, with a soft transition between them.

It's hard to notice at first glance.

Upon closer inspection, Robert realized that it seemed to be using ambient light to simulate the lighting atmosphere of different "moments." Mysterious, shimmering starlight, bathed in the golden light of midday sun, flickering candlelight, and the morning mist.

perhaps.

This is what Ms. Sarah referred to as the "stopped clock." As a top art critic, the art director of *Painting* magazine has the right to think that such an arrangement is rather stingy, but it would certainly be enough to fool a layman like Robert.

Robert has stumbled into a labyrinth of time.

He felt he couldn't understand the meaning these works were trying to convey. They were just nice landscape paintings, but what else could they possibly have?

He reverted to the young man he was two years ago, struggling with his graduation thesis, clutching his hair, desperately trying to glean some of the professors' true meaning from those famous works.

Ok.

It looks impressive, but besides the combination of colors and lines in the picture, what else can we see?
He was like a child looking at an overly complex Lego toy with thousands of parts, only to find a picture printed on the packaging and lose the instruction manual.

I want to reach out and grab it, but I'm too ashamed to do so.

And sometimes.

Robert seemed to be completely absorbed in the moment. The clock ticked away, and in a daze, Robert believed, or rather, imagined, that he had become an art critic with his own online entry, incredibly arrogant, strutting around the exhibition hall like a swan, pointing out the shortcomings of each work.

In a daze.

Standing amidst these towering exhibition halls and the bustling crowds.

The book of the future, the one he hoped to write, "The Power of Art," which would be even more successful than the television documentary that defeated "Sex and the City," was already laid out before him.

The following excerpt is from Chapter 1 of art critic Robert Kent's book, *The Power of Art: From the Heart*.

"At first, I didn't feel that this exhibition was anything special. It didn't feel like being hit on the forehead again and again by an apple thrown into the sky, as Deckard Anlen described. Nor did it feel like Ms. Sarah's disdain for the exhibition being 'petty'."

"This is the first time I've seriously looked at an art exhibition. Its atmosphere perfectly matched all my expectations for an art exhibition in a major museum. These expectations included—tranquility, peace, elegance, everyone being quiet, and the only sound being the soft rustling of shoes on thick deciduous leaves. And most importantly... I couldn't understand it at all."

"I feel like I'm standing under that apple tree that supposedly hit Newton on the head, trying to look up... When will the apple fall? And what is the law of universal gravitation anyway?"

"I may have arrived too early."

"The apple tree is still a sapling."

"I may be too late. All the apples have fallen on the neighbor's kid's head. Deckard Anron, Sarah, the director, and all those art critics who write reports after media day have already invented the law of universal gravitation. And just ten minutes ago, Sarah was reminding me that reinventing the wheel and being second to others is usually not a good sign in the art industry."

"I was wandering around the exhibition, trying to figure out something from the works... Just when I thought I might leave empty-handed, as I moved from one booth to another, from one painting to another, the colors burst forth on the canvases, and the roses and sunlight suddenly became intensely hot."

"..."

An apple fell on my head.

"Flowers, leaves, pines, chaotic starlight, and the mirror-like sky in a watercolor painting all reflect the firelight of the soul. How to put it? Sometimes, art exhibitions will refuse the audience. Only when you have a certain desire or passion in your heart, and only when you treat it seriously enough, will it make an exception for you."

"As I write this, I still can't quite capture the feeling, but Mr. Deckard Anlen helped me to some extent. I remember Mr. Anlen handed me a note yesterday. I opened it, and it said—"

"This is a work that resembles a phoenix in flames."

"I called Mr. Anlun again specifically for this. On the phone, he told me that at Deck Anlun's first exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he received a lot of praise. What excited him the most was not how many art critics praised him as a rising star of Chicago, nor that he reached an agency agreement with an art dealer from a major New York gallery, nor even that a super-rich member of the Disney conglomerate, Walt Disney's grandson, stopped in front of his work."

"That day, there was a fat old lady who stood in front of the exhibition for a long time. The fat old lady was deaf and mute and could not speak clearly. She gestured for a long time, and Deckard Anlen did not understand sign language at all. Just when he was getting impatient and wanted to leave, the woman found a pen and wrote this line on the supermarket receipt for him."

"This is a work that resembles a phoenix." As a child, Deckard Anron would gaze for a long time at Picasso's paintings in the school corridor, feeling as if he were in a different time and space. The works surged within the frames, and Deckard Anron's own soul drifted along with them. He vaguely remembered that this was a work that resembled a phoenix, a description that someone had given to Picasso after an art exhibition in his youth.

"Dack Anlen was ecstatic about this."

"It was an inexplicable, unprovoked ecstasy; he felt struck by the power of art. For years, Mr. Anlun carried that note in his wallet. He never experienced such ecstasy again for many, many years to come."

"When Deckard Alan learned that I wanted to write a book about the power of art, he decided to give me this note."

"It's sitting next to my laptop right now. The original thermal print on the Walmart receipt has long since faded with time, and at first I thought it was a white sticky note, but the sentence is still clearly visible in ink."

"This is a work that resembles a phoenix in flames."

"PHOENIX. Everyone has a different definition of the phoenix in their heart—Picasso, Deckard Anlun, that deaf and mute fat old lady—but I believe it represents a similar ecstasy."

"Tacitus spent a great deal of time describing the phoenix. In the Roman Empire, people believed the phoenix truly existed, and they even displayed 'phoenixes' in Rome. They praised its colorful plumage and said that when a phoenix truly appeared, it would cause ordinary birds around to gasp in amazement and gather in awe. As for its appearance cycle? It ranged from approximately 540 to 1461 years. Whenever a phoenix reached the end of its lifespan and was about to die, it would build a nest with a fertile object as an altar to the sun god, and then be reborn." "Of course."

"Although I seriously doubt that the colorful phoenix displayed by the Roman consuls back then was just some kind of dyed bird, let's talk about this legend."

"Time—the theme of this art exhibition."

"Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset. This cycle of time always corresponds to the cycle of the phoenix's life."

"So what is the 'fire' on the altar of the sun god?"

"I've only read a few articles about art, and I didn't know that 'phoenix' had been used to describe Picasso. When I saw this comment, the first person I thought of was Van Gogh. He is the person in the art world who has been most often described with the image of 'burning' in the past hundred years. His works are also burning works. When he paints starlight, the starlight looks like burning. When he paints sunflowers, the sunflowers look like burning. When he paints self-portraits, his whole being seems to be burning."

He said to add fuel to the fire in one's heart, that everyone has a fire in their soul, but people often only see the smoke. He said the sun is like the burning flame.

"Fire is the power of art; fire is the youthful ecstasy in Deckard Anron's heart."

"A person will inevitably grow old under the powerful force of time."

"But there will always be a new phoenix, which will be rejuvenated in the process of rebirth."

"When feelings are awakened, colors come alive."

"When feelings are awakened, life is reborn."

Robert was lost in thought at the art exhibition.

Ms. Sarah was typing a message on her phone: "An A-grade exhibition," was her assessment, without any further explanation.

Regarding Gu Weijing's age, this A is the A of "Aplus".

He did a good job.

By Sarah's standards, an A is just a barely passing grade.

Gu Weijing may have come to know himself in the intense emotional sparks born from his brushstrokes, but the shortcoming is that there are too many traces of "affectation" in the whole work.

in other words.

This is a decent art exhibition, but by no means an exhibition of geniuses.

What is the exhibition of truly brilliant paintings in Sarah's mind?

The old lady stood up and slowly walked out of the Louvre.

"Perhaps it should be like what Keats wrote in his poem—"
-

"what!"

Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

A large, white, rugged off-road vehicle sped along the edge of the dunes, leaving a trail of dust over a hundred meters high, like a greasy, pot-bellied middle-aged man jogging along, shaking the ground and waving his hands behind him, sweating profusely.

"Speaking of...that—poet's—personality—"

Through the lowered window of the SUV, a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses was wildly twisting the steering wheel while reciting obscure and riddle-like poems.

"—It is not itself, it has no self, it is not itself, it has no self. It is everything, and it is nothing. It has no characteristics, and it has characteristics. It loves light, it loves shadow, and it exists in all things..."

"poet--"

"It is the most unpoetic of all things in the world, because it has no identity, because it is constantly enriching and satisfying others..."

Huhu huhu.

The off-road vehicle came to a stop on the road beside the sand dunes.

The middle-aged man slammed on the brakes, turned his head to look at the young man in the passenger seat, and coolly pushed up his glasses.

"Was everything recorded?"

Gu Weijing leaned out of the car window and gagged violently.

Yang Dekang patted Gu Weijing on the back and complained, "I'm not trying to be mean, but Brother Gu, how can you get carsick doing something so tough? Do you know how expensive dune bashing is here? You don't know how to enjoy life. If I were here, I definitely wouldn't get carsick."

"Let me calm down, let me calm down... I felt like the car was going to flip over."

Gu Weijing covered his mouth.

He arrived in Abu Dhabi but stayed in his hotel room the whole time, not going to the exhibition. Yang Dekang found him and, seeing Gu Weijing like this, worried that Gu Weijing was getting bored and restless. So he grabbed his brother Gu and took him to Dubai for a cool off-road dune bashing trip.

Such a manly thing, and I get carsick.

"Ah."

Old Yang picked up his phone, opened his photo album, and checked his previous dashing and debonair photos, preparing to edit them and post them on his WeChat Moments.

"What were you just reading?" Gu Weijing suddenly asked.

"What."

"It's something like poetry."

(End of this chapter)