A side trip to Holland

15 August 2021

 A side trip to Holland

These photos have been sitting on my desktop for the longest time and have been disjointedly staring back at me, all the while filling me with thoughts. What I wanted to express about them is that even in these fractured-looking details, they possess a unity unto themselves. 

I took these close-ups at the National Gallery in London, a place I love hanging around when I’m in town, where else? Just in a few details reveals a whole hidden world of something sacred in a sensual form and both so pleasurable and easily digestible at the same time. Immobile, they hang stationary on the walls yet they entice one like glamorous women at a cocktail party who cruises by without ever looking up, leaving a scent of perfume These silent portraits, it’s as if we’ve been given a peek into a world to which we’ve been forbidden access. 

Somehow, oddly enough, it makes me think of an acorn from an Oak tree. The acorn when dropped off and separated from the tree, if lucky enough, will become another tree. Maybe a bird will scoop it up, fly somewhere, then poop it out on fertile ground somewhere else. But already in that acorn is everything necessary for it to become another tree, virtually identical and new. There is an organic process at work that allows for this to happen for all things in Nature including in the animal world. There is both unity and chaos in Nature, but also in Art too, when it’s really good. 

And just as something in the acorn that understands it will become a tree one day, and so too, did something deep within Vincent Van Gogh, also grasp that he was destined to become a painter. How could it have been otherwise?

So, in each portion of this early portrait there is already a whole expression, complete in pictorial unity. 

I find this fascinating and it’s just one of the many mysteries surrounding Vincent Van Gogh and that’s manifest throughout his work. For me, perhaps the most endearing element of his entire oeuvre is his empathy which he so readily expresses in each and everything he ever created.

He once said in a letter (I forget to whom) “Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done..” 

Like all things Van Gogh, there is still, despite the somewhat awkward illusion, a sense of the unity in these details. Like a few other lucky painters he appears to have been born with an innate understanding of light. In his early portraits done of the peasants of the Borinage region of Belgium he seeks a traditional style of painting from an earlier period, one where light came out from a dark background, most notably in Rembrandt’s style when painters used a dark ground.

That Vincent received such divination is also one of the great miracles in the history of Art. His love for Rembrandt was fundamental to his development and he made endless copies after the Dutch master whom he revered, not only for his exceptional painting abilities but also for the deeply spiritual aspect of Rembrandt’s entire oeuvre. I think Vincent was born with talent as some lucky ones are, but like many artists, he had to fight like a salmon upstream to become a painter. Unlike many lesser artists, his instincts were really good and he developed them by studying really great paintings in museums and in books. Not only did he have a nose for greatness but he studied really hard. He worked, so very diligently, that in today’s world he would be regarded as an over-achiever. He was always at it, which we understand from all of his correspondences. His earliest drawings filled his letters to brother Theo in Paris and revealed a remarkably innate and accomplished talent while he was teaching in London. 

My teacher, Léo Marchutz in Aix, once talked about his own secular divinity regarding Van Gogh in the following manner:

Though he (Léo) was raised as a secular Jew in Nuremberg, I never heard him speak of things either religious or spiritual, and others have confirmed this to me also. By all appearance he was not religious at all, nevertheless, a lot of his own work was centred around the New Testament curiously enough. Léo was speaking to me about Van Gogh one day, specifically just how Vincent, during the last 3 months of his life, had painted a size 30F (92 X 73 cm) picture almost each day in Auvers-sur-Oise, and adding, “if that is not some proof that a spirit, or God, whatever one wants to call it, took hold of this poor man and wrung 90 paintings out of him in this period, one picture a day (at least) right before his death, then I don’t know what to call it”. As usual Leo had a way of understanding things that were both compact and direct.