We have just spent a few days in Amsterdam doing some of the things I've wanted to do for years. So I spent a long time in the Van Gogh Museum, looking at some of his most famous work. It's a busy place. Even if you book online and miss the long entrance queue, there are still long queues, guided tours, people with audio guides enwrapt in the context and detail, and most folk jostling for a good view of the celebrity paintings. It would have been easy to become grumpy at the sheer struggle to look, see, gaze, admire, appreciate these masterpieces. And I often find those in front of me are bigger than I am which means a total eclipse of the painting if it's one of those really big tourists.And I haven't developed that brass knecked assertiveness that proceeds through an art gallery oblivious of courtesy, - an art gallery seems an inappropriate place to text out the survival of the fittest.
But standing amongst such riches of aching beauty, soul piercing eagerness to articulate deepest pain and deepest joy, and the anguish of someone who was unheard, misunderstood, and at times ridiculed by those who thought his art was merely madness, the least of my concerns was the bustling art lovers. Enough to be amongst those who have found there way here, to stand in front of this man's soul shaped and passionately coloured art, and to feel the depths of my own humanity, my own needs, and yes my own anxieties and joys. Some of these paintings expose our most cherished hopes, and our most self-diminishing fears, while also drawing us to see in the angst and exuberance of the artist, the two poles of human longing.
All that said, how can you look at the painting of his bedroom and not feel a deep love for the man who saw like that, and thought to paint a place so constrained and ordinary, with such extraordinary freedom and emotional investment. The story of Van Gogh and his brother Theo is one of remarkable courage, vision, tragic struggle against illness, faithful friendship between brothers, grabbing life with both hands yet unable to hold firmly to all that is life affirming and humanly fulfilling.
Some have tried to write about the spirituality of Van Gogh, or have used his paintings as devotional sounding boards. I don't doubt there are profound symbols and hints obvious and obscure in his work that encourages spiritual reflection. Indeed several of the overtly religious paintings do their own kind of aesthetic homiletic. But sometimes the message isn't in the painting; the painting reaches beyond articulated understanding and wounds us where comprehension is unnecessary, and recognition of who we are and why we are is sensed in that place deeper than reason and more permanent than passion.
I took a photo and removed the picture frame - better than some of the prints on sale, but the power is in the original.
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