Reading a Life More Interesting Than the Art

I don’t know much about art. I can’t draw, I don’t paint, and the most artistic thing I do is colouring with markers, which I’m decent at as long as the lines are clear. So reading Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux wasn’t part of some grand plan to get into art history. I just wanted to read about something I didn’t know anything about, and this happened to be it.

What surprised me was how readable it was. I went in knowing basically nothing about Gauguin beyond “painter, probably intense,” and came out thinking his life was far more interesting than his job title. He lived around the same time as people like Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas, but the book isn’t really about movements or techniques. It’s about a man who was chaotic, unlucky in love, permanently short of money, and constantly making decisions that made his life harder. The struggling artist thing isn’t romantic here; it’s just exhausting.

I found myself thinking a lot about how unlucky he was in his personal life, especially his marriages, and how much time he spent away from his children. For all his faults, it did seem like he loved them, even if he wasn’t very good at being around. His childhood and his insistence on seeing himself as a kind of outsider, a “savage from Peru,” made him feel like someone always slightly at war with where he came from and where he ended up.

I still don’t know anything about art, and I don’t feel like I need to after reading this. But as a book about a strange, messy person trying to live the way he thought he was meant to, it was unexpectedly engaging. I picked it up out of mild curiosity, finished it a bit more thoughtful than I expected, and that was about it. Which, honestly, feels like enough.