"I wanted to be a preacher," he said once, sitting outside a boarded-up church. "But they told me I cared too much. That I lived like the poor."
He looked down at his ragged boots, cracked at the sole.
"I didn't live like them. I was them."
He used to sleep on straw mats, wearing a threadbare coat through Belgian winters. He gave away his belongings to coal miners and slept in the dirt. Ate crusts of bread dipped in paint water. Once, he wrote a letter saying he hadn't eaten for two days, but he didn't mind — the sky had been beautiful that morning.
"They say I'm insane," Vincent whispered, "but maybe they just mean I'm not afraid to feel everything at once."
—
Rex learned more in those months than he had in any studio.
He learned how to paint pain with yellow. How to use red not for blood, but for the heat of memory. How to let blue speak of despair, not like a scream, but like a quiet confession in the dark.
