Van Gogh's passion is something I can feel
I wrote a while back about diving into a book called The Yellow House. It's about Van Gogh and Gauguin living in a small yellow house in Arles in the south of France. So much to say. I've always been fascinated with Van Gogh's work. The story surrounding his madness has always saddened me, but that is subsumed to the joy I get from looking at his paintings. Such brilliance.
This feeling was amplified when I visited NYC for the second time in 2000. I was attending the National Model UN conference that April. We were Norway, and I was the representative to the High Commission on Human Rights. It was a great week, but by Thursday my friend Daniel and I were burnt out on alcohol, concrete and urban noise, not to mention Delmontico's. So we blew off the last day and headed up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I was blown away by the collections of ancient artifacts, the sculpture, the armor and weapons, the Warhol. But there were two things I wanted to see. Monet and Van Gogh.
The Monet collection was beyond brilliant, but when I walked into the room displaying the Van Gogh paintings I was stunned.
New York is quite the loud town for a southern boy from a small city like Winston-Salem. My head had buzzed for several days with the constant din of millions of people going about their business. By the time I met Dusty Baker on the hotel escalator that Wednesday, I wasn't even fazed.
But when I walked into this room, the energy lit my being. The vibrancy emanating from the works was beyond belief. Also unbelievable was the fact that no one spoke. Every one was in awe. In the largest city in the country, one of the most vibrant in the world, people were speechless before the brush strokes and color schemes of a mad Dutchman who labored in anguish more than a century prior.
I believe a version of the Sower was there as was First Steps. I put my nose as close to the mounds of paint rising off the canvas as possible. It was the most awesome experience of my life prior to the birth of my son.
So back to the book.
Martin Gayford's treatment of Van Gogh's attempt to create an artists oasis in the south of France was a great read. I am not an art historian, so I won't be gettin' all uppity on you. But this book was awesome.
Van Gogh created some of his best known works in Arles, including Starry Night over the Rhone, his entire Sunflower collection and Cafe Terrace at Night.
Reading about his daily life, mixed with introspection via his letters to Theo, gave intense meaning to each brush stroke.
I knew very little about Paul Gauguin before the book, and he comes across as ego centric and hackneyed in contrast to Van Gogh's soul pain, but he provides the only perspective to Van Gogh's actions during the "turbulent" nine weeks they spent together.
Plenty of others have written better reviews of the book than I can.
I will say that it hurt my heart to be with Van Gogh as he fell into madness and felt his towering hopes and dreams for an artist colony fall to pieces.
Gayford's book is very accessible for the light reader and gives incredible insight into what it was like for two artistic giants to live and work in close proximity in the south of France in 1888.
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