Born: Butte, Montana, 1938
Served in Vietnam, U.S. Army
Intelligence Officer, 1967-73
Prisoner of War, Captured at Hue,
Held in southern China and Hanoi, 1968-73

From the Artist:

From a series of letters and statements, 1983, 1988, and 1995:

What is Mental Anguish? It is a painting by Theodore Gostas. It is a companion piece to Physical Pain. Gostas has carved himself in art history by hacking and hewing at the mountain of life; he has succeeded in ingesting it all and then handing it back....He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was tortured and squeezed like a diamond in the grip of fear, terror, and stress, then set free. So he paints.

At the top of the painting, do you see the castle where a head of hair should be? This is the haunted palace Edgar Allan Poe created in one of his poems. The face beneath the castle is not pretty or ugly; it is one of the greatest faces ever painted, for it says absolutely nothing. There are no real limbs beneath the face. Arms and legs are not needed in solitary confinement. The sky background is sick—not promising....

Having established through interrogation that I fear werewolves the most, the Communists chose full-moon night to put me in with one, as a roommate. No doubt he was a drama student or from a Vietnamese acting troupe, but to my tormented mind, driven through hell by four years in solitary confinement, he seemed authentic....

There is no mystery to my art, though some might find it mysterious. I am a war artist, and there is mystery in war, it is only perceived as such by those who have not lived with war. In the pain of war some objects may change form, but they are never out of focus....A prisoner of war may go mad and become a castle-haired mountain of shifting flesh. Things are done this way because my pain has been too intense for any other form of expression, including screaming....I tried poetry. A three-star general read my book of war poems and called me to his office and said I was the poet laureate of the United States Army. I was flattered and full of pride, but I came to realize that my poetry was born of the excitement of freedom and was, therefore, not the best vehicle for expressing my appreciation of life, living. I decided that poetry was not nearly as important as the expression of my pain, as manifested in painting and drawing. I did my bit with fear and survived; pain, however, was and sometimes still is the only adversary to which I buckle, and as a result, I pay pain tribute. I try to avoid bedlam, the place where souls cannot communicate their anguish because they lack control. Control is the secret to communication and artistic expression. I force the viewer to look at my art and thus at me. The viewer may rail at me, call me names, or turn away in disgust, but he is changed because I have controlled my scream enough to let him hear it and see it....

Often I hurry when I paint because my feelings of pain shift from one image to another instantly and I feel compelled to rush after them all, to express as many as possible. Usually, I find myself settling into a rhythm of brushstrokes that slowly erodes away the anguish and loneliness precipitated by the pain. As a painting draws near completion, I have a fear that I may only have screamed, and not really communicated my feelings and experiences....

I love color—deep, rich, intense, and vivid color. Color is almost godlike to me. It soothes and numbs, explains, speaks, and confuses. My heart aches with frustration when I can't for some reason deepen colors to suit my aims....I have used symbolism and expressionistic imagery to describe my experiences and feelings while incarcerated....

War still blooms like a human-consuming Venus flytrap. I would like to hold a mirror up to war and hope that once it looked at itself, like Medusa it will begin to die. But I could not hope to be the instrument of war's death; such vanity is folly. I just want to keep on pushing war around, making it feel uneasy and afraid to sit down.